Review: Has the feel of old-time SF
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 11 24, 2013
I really wanted to like this book, it has the feel of old-time SF from the thirties and forties. It is a typical hero-finds-a-spaceship-and-blasts-off-for-high-adventure type of book, the kind I loved when I was a youngster. The only way to describe the story telling is exuberant. It is written in a style and at a level that would be appropriate for eight graders, but that is fine too, the great Robert Heinlein wrote what he termed “juveniles” aimed at a younger market. Without SF books for adolescents there eventually won't be any adult SF fans. That's the good part of this review.Unfortunately, there are a multitude of problems with The Battle of the New Orleans—some stem from the writing itself, but most are due to the horrendous lack of editing. Taking them in order, my complaint about the writing is a criticism about the science, or more specifically the inaccuracy there of. Understand, I am both a scientist and a SF author myself, so I might be a bit more sensitive to such matters than most. In any case, here is my complaint—if you are writing SCIENCE FICTION you are obligated to adhere to the scientific knowledge of the day. Good SF does not contradict accepted science. This does not mean you cannot speculate wildly about future technology or aliens, just that you should not include statements that are so blatantly wrong that anyone who occasionally tunes in the Science channel would know it.I have no problem with the posited Gravity Wave drive or the RMFF, a reasonable case can be made for both. But to use the old saw of a strange element not on the periodic table, that was found on an asteroid ejected from a black hole, trillions of years ago (yes, trillions) is so inexcusably unscientific that I nearly stopped reading at that point. I will give you a suggestion, Dale, keep it vague and have your science stuff checked by a local physics teacher or anyone who has taken science in college recently.The second and more pervasive problem with this book is the godawful lack of editing. Sentences run on forever at times, often with random words inserted in the middle. Punctuation is haphazard at best, possessives seem totally unknown, word use is frequently wrong and it appears that sometimes two sentences have become mashed together after the end of one and the start of the next were edited out. Even the spacing of the text is awkward, like the author/typist tried to use tabs and spaces to indent paragraphs. Quotation marks are often surrounded by extra spaces or are positioned incorrectly.  Most self-published books have errors in them, but the extent of the ungrammatical carnage present in this book is simply embarrassing. I do not like to discourage writers, particularly SF writers, but I am giving this effort two stars—and that is being generous.