Review: Tea Party Science Fiction
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 25, 2011
A enlisted man finds himself part of a human navy contingent on an alien spaceship that is the galactic equivalent of a tramp steamer, making its way from port to port trading with the local life forms. The story follows his slow rise through the ranks of the traders, succeeding through his own intelligence and application. Our hero becomes a rich and respected hero amongst the traders, flowering as his suppressed abilities make themselves known in the meritocratic environment of the trading culture. The enemy here is not the aliens but rather the arrogant members of the navy contingent's human officer class. We gradually hear more about the situation back on earth, devastated by terrorism, unemployment and the evils of outsourcing. At the end, when the trading vessel returns to Earth, this uneasy undertone of populist resentment breaks out into full extreme-right violent paranoia. Our hero returns to a society run by an oppressive federal government, where the population is held down by EPA bureaucrats and the jackbooted thugs of the IRS, TV blares homosexual propaganda and the only solution is armed uprising and the declaration of himself and his entourage as a sovereign nation. This last section of the book leaves an unpleasant taste that overwhelms the generally uplifting message of the rest of the book.