Review: Three Stars is for Average, a Solid Effort
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 3, 2012
I really enjoyed reading "Information Cloud" (in spite of errors which were not egregious enough to prevent me from the immersive experience every reader hopes for). As a retired editor, I can't help seeing mistakes in punctuation and spelling. ::sigh::The plot was a variation on a standard plot, and quite well done. The cyber electronics and cryptography were awesome, though at times bordering on comic book level (think: Transformers). I loved the tech stuff, especially the various transports and drones.The characters ranged from mediocre to excellent. I take exception to portraying people in combat suddenly taking time out to anguish over personal problems. Being shot at tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully on personal and unit survival.Then there was the ending. Events happened with highly placed important people that made no sense to me. Up until then, I was in the groove, no list of characters or glossary needed. But the last two chapters lost me. I can't say more without spoilers. It wasn't just that the author dumped the ending, to hook the reader into the sequel; it was that one character went from the end of one chapter, to the beginning of the last chapter in a way that did not make sense in sequence, not even with all my little gray cells working overtime.Bottom line: I enjoyed it and I recommend the book to science fiction fans. Just watch out for the ending--it's a doozy. I'll look forward to the next in the series.