Review: Shallow, superficial and silly
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 03 24, 2013
"Erinyes" is a disappointing novella, not particularly well written and totally nonsensical in execution.It's the far future, thousands of years at least, but nobody is quite sure exactly how may years have passed from today. People frozen with hope of medical resuscitation in our time are being revived aboard a spaceship that just has just jumped to the Large Magellanic Cloud. And there is some undercurrent to their revival that does not bode well.So far so good, but that's about it for the plot, which lurches from ludicrous to even more ludicrous with each page. It is hard to describe how askew "Erinyes" is because it just makes no sense on any level. McElhaney fails to envision the far future, merely pasting ideas of today onto the shaky edifice that is his story. So we have keyboard driven computers; a Kindle of the future that apparently lacks WiFi so individual novels are stored on individual Kindle's; everyone speaking and reading English; paper copies of user manuals; resurrected people expected to not only operated a star ship with a day or two's training, but then participate in a fire-fight with an evil alien race.Add to this a romance thread that blossoms in no time at all and which is so trivial that it makes Mills and Boon the epitome of high art, and you have a novella that is so emotionally detached that there is nothing to grab onto as a reader. Things happen, but there is no tension, no conflict and no personal growth or introspection. The reason for the ship, the IG Andromeda, being where it is in the first place is not examined or debated in any way, so the moral implications of their actions, which could have triggered an easy hundred pages of interesting happenings, is ignored.As I finished it (and short as it is, it took a conscious decision to do so) I shrugged because there seems no point to the venture.Surely "Erinyes" was written for teenagers? But even on that basis, it's not that good a story, so if you want to dip your toe in the turbulent seas that are sci-fi, hunt out Heinlein's classic, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" and get a taste for how good it can be.