Review: Roller Coaster From Beginning to End
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2011
Dominant Species spends a few pages introducing us to a Marine major and his crack team of specialists and then drops them on a rebellious mining world to break open a fuel depot for an incoming invasion force. Which goes really well until they fall down a mine shaft into a deep cavern occupied by a mysterious, ancient ship. The book follows their race for survival against odds that only continue to mount against them....In short, you pick up this book and once you get past the first couple of chapters' worth of set-up, you don't put it down until the characters are safe at the other side. This is great military SF: non-stop action, great tech (there was some serious thought put into their power armor) and an unexpected plot to boot. The author has a pretty impressive background, too; seriously, his other available book is The Emergency Responder's Guide to Terrorism. That's not fiction, mind.I read some of the reviews left about this book and was puzzled by them. Some people complained there wasn't enough character development, and I wondered: good Lord, in what time? People who are trying desperately not to die don't exactly have time for deep conversations about their feelings. This book is solid action from beginning to end: you read it for the same reason you get on a roller coaster, for the adrenaline high. Dominant Species definitely delivers.I did have a couple of quibbles: the author confuses "it's" and "its," which is tiresome if you're sensitive to grammar; years of reading forum posts have inoculated me against outrage so it didn't bother me. There were also some wordos (the author liked to use the word "prosaic" when he really meant "poetic" for instance). And the title is a little misleading given the plot. Otherwise, I found it quite enjoyable.If you're looking for a novel that reads like a summer blockbuster action flick, complete with awesome gadgets and cool extrapolations of future tech, you have got to pick this one up. You can sample it and see if you like it. The whole book's only $1.99. Cup of coffee or several hundred pages of explosions... doesn't seem like a hard choice to me. :)