Review: The author needs editing, alpha readers, and a re-write
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 11 27, 2011
The author seems to be of the group which says "It doesn't have to make sense, it's science fiction."Other reviewers have already listed a number of the issues that pull you out of the readers trance and jerk you into wondering what the author could have been thinking, but lets walk through a few of them:* The author breaks Chekov's rule on page one, setting up prohibition of "Cosaline" as the major prohibition-era-like problem of the age, and then promptly drops it, never to appear again.  The shotgun is never taken off the mantel.* By page four we're being told that "policing the plains of traffic" was a nightmare...  the vision of traffic spreading out across the central US probably wasn't what the author had in mind, but a spelling checker can only go so far.  Planes of traffic please.* Staying on page four, we're jerked from the discussion of the nature of cars and traffic congestion to be told that "For all that modern technology had brought them, it had increased crime at an equivalent rate."  We're left wondering who "they" are.*We're told he's on floor 62 of 90 of the building he's on, and that civilian cars can go up to 300 meters, presumably 100 to 150 floors.... and that the traffic below him is so dense he can't see the ground...  but then, in the next paragraph we're told that he "looked out over the towering city apartment blocks" -- how, when he's only 2/3 of the way up his building and the traffic must go up even above the top of the building he's in?I'm not trying to be a creep here, but the problem is, this kind of thing happens on almost every page. Cars can float inches off the ground on air cushions for weeks at a time, without blowing the people trying to reach them off their feet, yet lifting goods through the atmosphere limits the amount of interplanetary trade, yet there is enough energy available to lift spacecraft directly from the ground which have apartment sized staterooms for 20 people, garaging for six cars, etc etc etc and transit them from earth to mars in 36 hours.Let's be generous and pretend that the earth mars distance is at minimum -- 56 million km... boost half way at some acceleration, flip and boost back to 0/0 works out to 1.3 gravities constant boost.  Incredible energies, and they do transits to jovian and saturnian orbits just as fast.  Just amazing.He needs editing, fact checking, and a consistancy checker.