Review: I really wanted to give this 5 stars; or 1
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 24, 2013
I love a good space opera. And, this series had all the potential to be one. But, this author needs a lot more seasoning, experience, and a good editor.This author clearly tries to put some realism in the science part of the fiction. And, I really wanted this to work. But sadly, it didn't for me.There are too many story lines poorly managed. The result is often jarring disruption of the reading experience. Tom Clancy couldn't handle this many separate story lines. Further, much of the plot is trite and contrived. Which would be OK in a good space opera if it didn't have all the other flaws.Character development is worse than non-existent. What passes for character development is full of fits, starts, reversals, and repeats. That is, for the characters that get any development at all. The rest are mostly two-dimensional cut-outs.Every space opera author is entitled some artifice to get past Einstein's relativity. The one used here is original and very creative: hyper-dimensions that have point-to-point relationships in space, but have smaller and smaller distances to travel. I think of it like the Pentagon building in Washington DC. If the outer ring is normal space, and the inner rings are the higher hyper-dimensions. To get to a distant point on the outer ring when I was there, we would not walk all the way around the outer ring, we would go in to an inner ring and walk around to the point where we could then just go back out to our destination on the outer ring. Thus, a given, constant walking speed would appear to cover much more circumferential distance per unit time than it would have if we stayed in the outer ring.--- Remarks about inertia retracted based on conversation with author ---Finally, the English is just sub-standard as written. In this third book alone, I marked 170 locations where there were clear editing fails: "there" used when it should have been "their;" "your" used in place of "you're;" "too" in place of "to;" etc. Words were missing from many sentences, or sentence fragments were mashed together making the results unintelligible. Verb tense or conjugation was frequently just wrong. The continuity from book 2 to book 3 was violated. For example, in book 2, Dr. Yu is falsely imprisoned by the "IIB" and then rescued by the Navy. But, in book 3 she harbors a grudge against the Navy for what they did to her in prison.I really wanted this to work. It came very close. But, in the end, it's mediocre at best.