Review: Straight Forward
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 3, 2013
This book is very much what you see is what you get. It is simple a tale about setting up a colony on another world. The world is inhabited by life forms that are extinct on Earth, sometimes hundreds of millions of years extinct, and other worlds. The planet has been designated as a "reserve" for species that were to be hit with an outside extinction event such as the dinosaur killing event.The flora and fauna of the new planet hasn't evolved in any significant way other than possibly social patterns. The dinosaurs in the book are portrayed as warm blooded and very avian in nature. It is rather a shock when most people expect reptilian cold blooded creatures. Most of the predators are Earth natives but a few are not. The non-terrestrial predators are super-predators as far as anything else is concerned.Action in the story is limited to human versus environment. There just isn't any inter-human strife on a level greater than hand to hand or weapon stand off. All other inter-human strife is social and occasionally intellectual. This does not detract from the storyline at all. It actually enhances it.As for problems, *sigh* well, there are quite a few. If I factored those into the actual rating of the book, it would reduce mine rating from four stars to two stars. The most significant problem is editing. The author really needs to use someone else to proof read his manuscript prior to publishing. There are few actual misspelled words BUT antonyms are rarely correctly used and verb tenses are completely FUBAR.The next problem is time scripting. At the end of the book three local years are supposed to have passed since landing however, there were only two winters written in the book. Third, there was no preamble to describe how the story actually begins and it is never truly addressed during the book. You can piece it together from a couple references, some imagination and deductive reasoning.Finally, the author drops a bombshell at the end of the book that leaves a great deal unexplored. This would be great if there was another book or two to be written, but it is plain from the final lines of the book that he doesn't intend to do so. I find that a bit annoying. :)Overall, the book is a good read for fans of speculative, man vs. nature social fiction. I really enjoyed it even though I had a hard time keeping suspense of disbelief intact at times.