Review: A pretty good read
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 17, 2011
This is a pretty good read. It has some issues here and there, but for the $1.50 I paid for the Kindle edition, they are tolerable. There were only 10 reviews of the book, all 4 or 5 stars. It is not a 5 star book by any means, and if it was a full priced book I might well have given it 2 stars. I gave it 3 because it has a lot of potential that is just not ever fulfilled.The author used a pretty good premise as a basis for the book. That premise being that the known universe is run by large corporations and the CEO of the most powerful corporation is the emperor. The main character, John Smith, is a disgraced guardsman of the empire. Another review referred to guardsmen as something akin to the praetorian guard, and that is not a bad analogy.There are some explanations of technology that are long winded and really need to be stripped from the book. The explanations don't make all that much sense.It is hard to believe that the emperor would not just have disgraced guardsman executed for the crime of sexually defiling his daughter on her 18th birthday. But, if you can live with the total lack of plausibility of the guardsman still being alive and allowed to keep all his special enhancements, most of the book is pretty good, story wise.There are some pretty good word images created to describe the world John Smith is exiled to. It seems doubtful that the princess (who we find out is in line to inherit the throne) would spend several years looking for the guardsman, but she does. Love wins out in the end I guess.It turns out that there is a plot to kill the princess and destroy the emperor's lineage. What we learn of the plot is pretty far fetched, but remotely plausible.One of the problems with the story relates to the economics of the world that the author created being totally unrealistic. Being as the economy that is described is somewhat central to the story, it is understandable, but there are these alarm bells that go off in my head when the unsustainable nature of what is being described unfolds in front of me. In fact, it is not even unsustainable. it is just plain unachievable. And that is the worst of it for me. If you are going to create a whole world, at least make it something that is believable.Just one example is the idea that 10% of the power being generated somehow gets siphoned off by people who live at the base of the towers where the more well to do live. And somehow, the guys running the power systems can't figure out where the power is going. The thing is that any power generator knows exactly where all of his power is going, or they would sure as hell find out where it was going to.There is also the goofy idea that what amounts to a whole underclass can develop living a good life but outside of the normal economy, and no one notices. These guys are basically leeching off the corporations and no one notices? Most corporations are going to notice. If the amount being leeched is small enough it might not be worth fixing, but they are going to notice.If you can get past the logical fallacies of the book, it is not too bad. I much prefer my SF to be more plausible, even if I know it "can't" happen.