Review: Realistic Starting of Solar System Exploration (fiction)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 23, 2013
I was pleasantly surprised by Chris Hechtl's book about an aggressive, but realistic, approach to establishing a first colony on Mars. By now, I have been a SF fan for more than 50 years, so rarely enjoy a "space" book that is set in the beginning days of space exploration. Character development is a little flat, but the story development kept me interested throughout. I have already purchased the author's "New Dawn (Wandering Engineer)" that seems to be the next book in an expanding series available as ebooks for Kindle.I would readily have awarded this book 5 stars, except for the too frequent occurrence of typos and misuse of words. For example, the word "aid" was often used when "aide" was intended or vice versa, "were" instead of "we're," "college" instead of "colleague," "too" instead of "to," "there" instead of "they are," "re-leaved" instead of "relieved," "here" instead of "hear," "lie" instead of "lay," "slopped" instead of "sloped," etc. A few times I was also distracted in conversations by lack of clarity as to which character was speaking. Simply stated, good writing, but a good editor/proof reader would have reduced the number of jarring incidents of encountering such errors while reading.