Review: has promise but mostly misses the mark
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 4, 2013
ETA 1-8-13As promised the author sent me a PDF of this short story to read. It was much more readable than the Kindle version but was formatted in a peculiar way that was harder to read than necessary. For one thing, paragraphs were indented and there was no blank line between them, and for whatever reason, the dialogue of the AI was italicized.The story has promise, but a lot of the assertions it makes left me shaking my head. For one thing, I never really believed one guy could run a ship of this size. I don't care what kind of genius he is, there just is only so much time in a day.I also had issues with the time scale. This huge cargo ship the main character was operating was able to make a rescue run to another ship in almost no time. Just is not going to happen.I did not believe that some very minor patches was all it was going to take to get the rescued ship functioning again either.I would just get rid of the alien. Just did not like that at all. Did not like the goofy religious overtones at the end either.So, while I read the whole thing, and thought parts of it had promise, overall, I gave it 2 stars.Having said that, it does have a pretty decent amount of creativity and a potentially good story line.This is my original review.Original title: gave up due to formatting issuesAn interesting premise for a short story I got for free recently.The part I read had promise but the formatting errors I kept running across made it hard for me to follow the story. Periodically sections of the text would just be missing. I don't know how much was missing but it was so annoying to me that I just quit on the book. A book I quit on gets 1 star from me.