Review: Dissapointed
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 15, 2013
Ghost Station is the fourth book in the Wandering Engineer Saga. Unfortunately, the author decided to reuse the same basic script as he used in Fool's Gold and Destiny's Choice. The saga is now very reminiscent of a TV script that changes only slightly from one episode to the next. This reeks of stymied creativity and really depresses the reader's desire to continue to the end since you already know how it's going to end. In failure. Overall, I would rate this book at 2.5 stars.To the author,The protagonist is a Fleet Admiral which in the portrayed universe was the second highest command rank available. To attain such a rank, the individual would be required to know and be adept at political maneuvering. The protagonist is not only ignorant of politics in the extreme, he is also adamantly anti-politics to the point of ignoring developing issues or potential problems at the start of another major project. This is extremely unrealistic and must be addressed quickly by the author. For further proof of point, the second and third books were both about politics more than anything else. A normal person let alone a high ranking military officer would look to the old adages - "once bitten twice shy" and "fool me once, shame on you; for me twice, shame on me". Please rethink your portrayal of this character and bring it more in line with a realistic personality. Just running away from a political or strategic mess would have restricted the protagonist to no higher rank Commander at the very very best.Giving every other entity in your novels a bias against him is also extremely annoying and unrealistic. In a situation like the future you have created engineers would be the highest of the high. They would be the only people between the death and continued life of ancient and battered space craft. This is especially true in Ghost Station where Irons was given an introduction and praise by the captain of the Destiny to the captain of the Kiev.Please be more creative with names. Using the same names for multiple characters is potentially confusing. The rather frequent use of late twentieth century cartoon and sci-fi television characters is cute at first but is starting to get old and is used too bluntly. The one that did it for me was the He-man/Cringer references.Please consistently write in a present participle or past tense. Using the present tense makes the books awkward to read and isn't done consistently either.In your comments you stated you had up to 22 possible stories for this saga. That tells me that you aren't going to allow your characters or plots to grow organically during your writing. This leads to wooden story telling which is what we are starting to see with the last few books of this series.Attention to the minutiae of every day life is only providing "gloss" and "space filler" to your books. It doesn't add anything of real substance. Used in moderation, it is a great thing. Using it like you do, in every single book you write is creating books where paragraphs, pages and whole chapters can be skipped without losing the story thread.Finally, please use either more proof readers or listen to your current proof readers concerning homonyms. This more than anything else is causing you to lose your fan base. Ultimately a very bad thing.