Review: Exciting mediocrity
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 24, 2014
Wanderer's Escape  is a puzzling book. It starts off being a juvenile, at least it would seem so due to the main character Jeff, but later descends into hormone driven sex among, well, some juveniles. The action is fast and plentiful but the characters are mostly one dimensional. The females are emotional and not overly rational; the males are schizophrenic, offering fatherly advice one minute and trying to kill the hero and his friends the next. The main problem is the main character, a 16 year old who was borne a slave. This guy has got to be the most naive and innocent youngster in the galaxy. I just don't buy it. If you were raised a slave, under horrendous conditions, ripped from your mother's arms as a child and tormented by sadistic guards you would have to become tough as nails to survive. This guy agonizes over hurting his enemies, crying frequently, but then goes ahead and slaughters thousands. Between multiple bouts of being poisoned, teenaged angst leads to plodding dialog that is mawkish and unbelievable. And then there is the actual science.While this book fully qualifies as Science Fiction, the science is of the hand waving type.  The ship, Wanderer, is evidently capable of almost anything, being of alien origin, and is constantly being reconfigured on the fly to just handle the next battle (after all, if it was too overwhelming there would be little drama). It's not that the same type of tech hasn't been  used in countless other novels, it has, but this novel offers no cohesive technological framework. The author seems to have thought "I'll need some lasers, and plasma canons and force shields, not to mention jump space so that pesky speed of light stuff doesn't get in the way." I'm surprised there weren't any light sabers and teleporters. An alien character is added late in the book who talks in Yoda-like mangled sentences.This is just SF by the numbers, a collection of tropes and idioms with a weak hackneyed plot that is not rescued by the action scenes. Other than the unrealistic characters, muddled plot, boring exposition, and deus ex machina on steroids gimmicks the writing was fine. It was entertaining, but I have no intention of reading the sequel.