Review: had potential
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 21, 2012
The author put this up for free recently so I snagged it. I wrote in a comment to someone else's review that I would read it and review it.I realized later that I had read another book by this author some time ago (also free) and had found it wanting and left it a 1 star review. If I had realized that before agreeing to read and review this book, I would never have downloaded it, because I just would not have wanted to spend the time on it.However, as it turned out, this is a somewhat better book. The other one was almost unreadable to me, even though I plowed through maybe half of it before giving up. Just way too many characters that seemed more like cartoon characters then real people and action that just was never believable to me.This one is better in the believable character and action side of things though. It does have issues in both of those areas, but it was not a complete deal breaker for me.As some other reviewers mentioned it has a noticeable number of writing errors in it - typos, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc., but, they were not so bad that it ruined the story for me so I gave the book a pass on these issues as is mostly my practice with free and low cost books.Its a short book, 2498 locations (whatever that means).The premise is not bad. Giant ant like creatures invade the portion of space ruled by man. According to the story there are millions of worlds ruled by man. The nature of the government is not revealed, probably because the author just could not describe such a vast entity in any practical way so just didn't try. Maybe the best way to handle such a thing.Apparently the Antz are telepathic so their collective consciousness can read the minds of mankind so man's technology is added to their own (ala The Borg from ST:THG) and ambushing them does not work.Mankind has not had a serious enemy for a while so defense expenditures have cut by the Senate.The Antz need meat to hatch their larvae. The story says they can grow all the plant material they want for the adults to eat, but the larvae need meat that the Antz get by attacking new worlds. Humans are just meat sources to them. I guess it never occurred to the Antz to feed the plant material they have in quantity to whatever critters they could find to feed the larvae.I found the characters mostly tolerable. Some of them did not seem like real people to me though.The space battles were not as well crafted as I would like. I couldn't see very well what was going on in my head from what was written. A lot of it seemed to be mostly numbers of ships and how many missiles. The reality of trying to control thousands of ships in real time in space at high velocities and in relatively close proximity was never explored in a way that made sense. It just sort of happened. And really, there did not seem to me to be very well thought out battle plans.One of my pet peeves with stories that portray space travel is with authors that can't seem to get the relationships between velocity, acceleration, and distance in the proper perspective. This one peeved me in that area.There was a weird time gap at some point in the book where in the space of a paragraph or so a couple of years went by.I could pick on a bunch of other stuff that annoyed me here and there. Apparently there is an expensive rejuvenation scheme available that is free to Fleet officers, and at reduced price to enlisted, but everyone else has to pay full boat. Yet it is so simple that it can be accomplished by a simple file transfer. One would think that the files that are apparently not all that hard to come by, would have been widely circulated in the at least 1000+ years that the technology has been in use. The story never says how long the rejuvenation technology has been available but one guy is depicted as being 1200 some years old.I give books I finish a minimum of 2 stars, reserving 1 star rating for books that are so bad that I give up trying to read them. This one is better than the average 2 star books I have read, but didn't quite make it to three stars in my reviewing scheme. Its close, but there are just too many things that bugged me about the story that forced me into giving it 2 stars.However, that is just me. The author seems to have a bit of a following that likes his style. Nothing wrong with that. It is just not a style I like very much.