Review: Fun read, but flawed
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 2, 2014
It was a fun read, as far as it went.  There's a lot of action, and the main character, a strong female leader, was interesting.  As a pure fantasy, where a small group of heroes take on a huge system with the deck stacked against them, it's very enjoyable.But...I found the idea of an all-powerful UN that sends people to death camps for ideological impurity to be more than a bit far fetched, but I went along with it because the title character was just interesting enough for me to stick it through. There was no clue from the book why the UN felt it needed to be so draconian, nor how it could behave in such an extreme fashion without word getting out sooner, but hey, it's a fantasy, right?  But it would have been nice if the big bad UN had some logical reason for being bad.  The most evil of men have some justifying reason for their behavior.  In this book, the individual bad guys pulling the strings at the UN love power over everything, which is believable because we have all seen people who appear to behave that way.  But those people tell themselves they want power for some higher purpose, even if they fool themselves.  We don't see that purpose expressed in this book, which would have given it some depth and added perspective to the conflict.I found the characters to be a little bit wooden, and prone to saying things out loud to each other that, in real life, they might be more circumspect about.  Especially if living in such a repressive culture.  Also, the characters (at least, the good guys) tend to have mainstream middle-class American values, even when they are busy being pirates.  This is a common flaw in science fiction, and to a certain extent is unavoidable if the reader is to relate to the character.  But honestly, it would be refreshing if someone would try once in a while.There are a few logical flaws in the story which jumped out at me, but in the end were easy enough to ignore.  Some examples:  1) The Milky Way seems to be used synonymously with the solar system.  Given a less-than-light-speed travel speed, you can't take statements about having traveled around the Milky Way seriously, and all the action takes place in the solar system.  2) If Amari is making so much money from her rare-element mine in the asteroid belt, why does she need to be a pirate?  Especially as she's grown tired of pirating?  A reason other, of course, than the story needs her to be a pirate.  3) Finding a new element in outer space may have worked in the (nineteen) thirties and even into the fifties, but in the twenty-first century it just betrays an ignorance of physics.  Another example of a limited understanding of physics is the concept of a space ship coming to a 'dead stop'.  I can't even guess what that would mean in a space environment, where your motion, or lack of it, is only meaningful in relation to something else.That last paragraph may seem like a lot of nit-picking, and I suppose it is.  But in truth there are a lot of nits to pick and I only picked four examples.  They are easy enough to ignore, individually, but every time you hit one it bumps you out of the story reality.  Too many of them and you can't slog through the story.  If you're going to write science fiction, you owe it to your readers to have a passing familiarity with science, or at least the science your story depends upon.