Review: Promising effort, room for improvement
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 9, 2013
As some of the other reviews have noted, this book reads more like a fantasy novel with a sci-fi setting.  Good plot, somewhat stereotyped characters but still interesting to follow.  How the characters interact with each other is definitely one of the author's strengths.  The science fiction aspects, and underlying science as well, is very soft.  I would say more along the lines of a Star Wars type of universe.  There's the expected science fiction prop pieces of technology, though no effort or hint of explaining what's behind the curtain.  To some readers looking for just plot and action this is no big issue, though I always like to see some effort to pull readers deeper into the experience with some world building background.  Even the best fantasy authors you could read spend some effort in building some type of magic system to build their fantasy worlds.  The way this author handles his universe isn't bad, I just think there's room for improvement that may be part of the overall plan in his series, I just would like to see more of it upfront.I didn't see any glaring plot holes, though some of the twists and turns of the story had me scratching my head as to why they happened that way.  There are holes in the science if you go looking for them, but it would serve the author well to put a bit more thought and research into it.  The main issue I have is that most of this story takes place on the multiple moons of a very large gas giant type planet.  Knowing this, the author implies normal day / night cycles similar to a rocky planet that orbits a star.  No matter how I look at it, there should be rather lengthy periods of time where the gas giant eclipses the sun from each moon's orbit.  Also, there's no indication of low gravity on such moons which the author implies to not be very massive.  Unless those moons are made mostly of obscenely heavy metals, they should have some indications of lower gravity than what the author paints to be a roughly standard "Earth" gravity frame of reference.  The other possibility is that the moons are earth-sized, but then the gas giant would have to be so massive that I don't think it would be believable that it never ignited into being a star itself.As for proofreading, I'm not seeing too many typos or grammar problems, sometimes there are incorrectly used words that would have been caught by a decent editor.  Things like "mute point" instead of "moot point", and "edition" instead of "addition."  These types of mistakes became more frequent nearing the end of the book than what I noticed in the beginning.Something else that could be improved is the length. I can't exactly put a finger on why, I just found myself not as interested in the large blocks of text that didn't always have much action or dialogue moving the story or character development forward.Overall, I like what I see and hope the author puts out more in the series soon.