Review: Thin and unimaginative
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2014
I am not sure who exactly this story is pitched at but it felt to me that the future arrived but someone forgot to tell the author.That sounds harsh perhaps, but early on there is a paragraph describing what is essentially a smart phone as if we'd not understand the concept.  A bit later in the story this future smartphone can't accept a document because it has run out memory. Seemed very 1980s to me and I actually jumped back to the copyright page just to check I had not picked up an older sci-fi novel. Nothing wrong if I had, of course, but you lower your expectations on both the science and technology front. Nope, it's current and so I felt justified in having higer expectations.Which led to a problem for me. Culp's future state of technology is so unimaginative that I found it hard to engage. The engineering crew on a star ship using a whiteboard for a task list? Seems unlikely - where is the natural evolution of Google Glass? Or mind-to-mind communicators or even a good old fashioned holotank? And the whole steampunk-vibe of the ship engine room itself, with knobs and dials, left me gleefully imagining wood lined trim and brass piping.I lost further faith when one of the settled planets is described as having a population of 60-odd billion with some 20% of them involved in the mining industry. I visualised a swiss-cheese of a planet, because that's a LOT of people digging stuff up and processing it.At the other end of the numeric scale, there is a single member of the MacTaggart clan left on a strangely depopulated Earth. Who happens to be a direct relation of the protagonist, how lucky was that. On Earth we have a very high tech train system with no explanation as to why that would be and while I don't expect a complete geopolitcal analysis in a novel, it is the kind of detail that is glossed such that I was left wondering "Why"?Then there was the "We've just come out of warp drive and been set upon by space pirates" sequence. Space is huge so the chance of this happening seems mind bogglingly remote. Yet the ship is armed and staff trained for just such occurances and like so many other events it seemed contrived to support the storyline not the natural outcome of Culp's little universe.The characters are mostly OK, though Sonia is not as punchy or well rounded as a number of other female leads I've read recently, but in places the dialogue feels forced and then it bizarrely changes so characters are talking with a Scottish brogue.It may seem that I am being overly fussy, because Culp has the basis of a reasonable story but the lack of imagination which keeps a lot of the book at 'current tech' kept tripping me up and that was frustrating. And where the tech is described, it is often merely a clone of stuff you'll read about now in CNET with too much wordage wrapped around it.Ultimately, I think this is too adult to have been written specifically for YA readers, but lacks the hooks of a well imagined future that will likely interest sci-fi stalwarts. Which leaves it nowhere in my mind and even at a couple of bucks there are way too many better novels you can spend your money on.ADDENDUM: Another reader, GM Frazier, commented that my review is unfair because I assumed this is a future Human timeline but the author explicitly notes it is set some other time, some other place. It is a fair point, but since nothing in the novel's structure or characterisation or locations or technology or **anything** conveys this, I found the author's explicit need to set the scene to be irrelevant. Or as I said more pointedly in the comments, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and swims like a duck...it's a duck. More sadly, even if I took this into account, it does not change the outcome for me in any way.