Review: This book is 3/4 great and 1/4 dumb
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 15, 2011
The space opera and trader rags-to-riches story is good while it lasts. Most of the anachronisms (Hornets in space without long-distance communications, computers, and networking?) actually have support in the text. Imagine a galactic civilization living off the crumbs from automated factories that nobody know how to fix or improve, perhaps?But the authority complex kills the book. Every chief, officer, or other human authority figure is criminally negligent, incompetent, and mad for rank above all else. This degenerates to ludicrous levels towards the end of the book, except for the protgonist, for whom power is not a corrupting influence. This treatment is, at best, ham-handed, and almost infantile.Which is too bad -- if the book was shorter, and actually delivered on the promise of the first half with an interesting build-up, it could have been a five.