Review: Needs work
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2011
The premise of this book is neat: a crew of an experimental sub goes through something extraordinary and finds themselves in a future where society has broken down. At the same time, a few survivors of an alien attack on Mars must make their way back to Earth via capture by the aliens. It was interesting at first but I found many of the characters were easily interchangeable, mainly the leaders of the two groups and the military men on Mars. In fact, one of the latter was so easily overlooked as to stop existing in the middle of the book! He wasn't killed, didn't wander off of the space ship and get lost, no suspended animation or the equivalent; he just stopped existing in the story. Clapton, where are you?The characters also seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the opposite sex even though their lives are all in danger almost constantly. The female who is nominally in charge of the sub when the captain and 3 other members of the crew go ashore, is so worried about the captain (though not the other 3 people) that she sends two more people out into the unknown to find him. And none of the other crew members went, "Wait. What?"Now the captain phones home and says, "we're fine but you need to recall those men because there are bands of dangerous people wandering around who could kill them." This news is passed onto our two wandering rescuers who promptly throw more wood on their fire. If this is the gene pool for humanity, we're in serious trouble.At this point, I don't think I'll finish the book even though I'm 60% through it. I have too many others interesting books on my list to fight my way through this.