Review: More Romance Novel than Science Fiction
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 9, 2013
I have iffy feelings about this novel by Laura E. Collins.  Like many inexperienced writers, she has some very interesting ideas, but over-reaches herself in the execution of her story.In this novel, the Earth is facing its final decades due to mishandling of the environment;  people are living underground or immigrating to immense space stations orbiting the planet.  So far, so good.  The heroine of this story is a nurse practitioner who wins a rare job on one of the space stations.  She arrives very short on funds, and learns that life on a space station is not as glamorous as one might think.  Life can be downright hard, with high food prices forcing newcomers to subsist on meager rations, little entertainment, long work hours and a very marginal,hand-to-mouth existence.  I found this view of life in space to be refreshing and unique.  Instead of the sterile white walled stations populated with technical geniuses that are very popular in SF, this station is rather grubby, poor and plain.  Life is mundane. Life is ordinary.  One struggles paycheck to paycheck.  One bargain shops for food on lower levels, one joins a free fitness class, one goes a little hungry, and learns not to splurge on unnecessary things.  I found this take on life in space to be well-detailed, and could envision the very station.  The female protagonist seemed to be an adventurous, brave, and interesting woman, living in a fascinating place in orbit around the Earth.  There is a very exciting moment when a space station is evacuated after an explosion.Unfortunately, the book becomes a pretty standard romance novel with the appearance of a completely perfect man in her life, who is more than he appears.  She has the usual several episodes of peril, from which he saves her;  she begins to be less interesting as her inner dialog turns to what to wear on dates and when to finally have sex with him.  There are several villainous characters, a "war in heaven" subplot, - it all becomes rather banal, and repetitive.Other than the interesting descriptions of life on space stations, there really is no science to this story unless you regard the complete the disregard for physics to be interesting.  This could have been such an interesting book if the author had developed some of her solid ideas and left the swooning heroine storyline out.  The writing style is a little wooden, too much 'tell' and not enough 'show' but there were some breakthrough passages.  However, taken in sum, Solar Wind wasn't compelling enough to make me want to read the sequel.