Review: Takes time to set a stage that is quickly abandoned
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 17, 2013
This series has spent a lot of time setting a stage that never seems to truly do more than limp along. In this second book we once again get quite a bit of information about a system and people with quite a bit of time spent creating and recreating the idea of what are becoming routine actions between people. Especially given how little action has occurred it makes the book at certain points feel very very slow. I also am getting a little frustrated that we seem to get so much information about what I would call minutia yet we still haven't been given much information about a lot of things. One of the biggest is we really don't know much about the Xenos. I had assumed they were human until the book talked a little about them. We still don't know how large their territory. We have been told that the Federation was so large and yet all their main planets form the hundreds of species were destroyed supposedly. Did that mean the Xeno's had as large of a population? It just feels as if so much information is not really given to us but just taken as a given.I also can't get over how much of the book is spent on boot-strap efforts and that it is so similar to what happened in book 1, I would think some of it could be skipped over and just given to us readers as a fait accompli. I also am surprised that after 700 years no geniuses had helped certain small systems to get back to at least a 20th century level of technology.I will pick up the next book but I think the author could be helped if he tried to pick up the pace and glossed over some of the classes and certain scenes we already are aware the common citizen is ignorant and want to learn for the most part.gallandro