Review: Decent Enough Escapism
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 27, 2013
Inception is a throwback to hard scifi mixed in with some space opera.  It worked on a basic level making it a decent read, something to escape the stress of the day.The storyline was OK.  I thought the timeline of things happening was way too quick, especially given the unexplainably long time it took one race to make navigational calculations.  Earth is able to manufacture and launch huge numbers of ships in days thanks to nanite technology despite the logistics that would be required to just provide raw materials at the correct place in that short amount of time.  The prime conflict resolution was almost a deus ex machina.  Actually, I think that is one of the main weaknesses with the book.  The protagonist was able to come up with solution for almost any problem thanks to an alien AI, a literal case of deus ex machina.  As a result of all these easy victories, there is almost no literary tension in the book.For hard science fiction, there was obviously a lot of thought that went into the science of the story.  I am not enough of a physicist to know if it was accurate, but mistakes such as the time it takes the sun's light to reach Pluto would make me suspect.  Still, it was interesting to read about the author's concept on the science.Editing was an issue.  While the grammar and spelling was satisfactory, the little things, especially spacing, was distracting.  After each and every italicized word, for example, there was no space before the next word.  For many quotation marks, there was a space between it and the first word in the dialogue.  Quotation marks are double or single, and back ticks are apostrophes.There were a couple of unfortunate choices made by the author that while not wrong, never-the-less interrupted the flow.  One was that the protagonist's nickname was "Cat" while she nicknamed her AI "Cal."  This slowed down the reading while making sure which one was doing what.  A more unfortunate choice, in my opinion, was to name one race of beings the Heshe.  Add on the fact that they were sexually able to change from male to female and back at will, and I could not help but hear "He-She" in my mind and imagine the flamboyantly transgendered performers of stage shows, not the beings as described by the author.  I "saw" a race of Rue Pauls and Thai ladyboys--not that there is anything wrong with that except that I don't think that is what the author intended.There were some minor miscues that should have been caught such as the previously mentioned issue with light and Pluto.  At one point, the author described a soldier throwing himself on concertina to allow others to run over him in WWII.  This was actually something that was introduced and then widely used in WWI during trench warfare.One high point of the book was one of the characters.  He was a priest and a scientist, something at odds with commonly held conceptions but not at odds with human history.  I personally don't see a dichotomy between science and religion, and I think the author did an excellent job at explaining this character's philosophy.Despite the issues I had with the book, it was still a fun read in the space opera tradition.  I enjoyed my time reading it, and that is the bottom line with any book.