alan laird
Like many middle volumes of a trilogy, this book moves the story forward and its best attributes are mostly continuations of things found in the first.
The story laid out so well in War Dogs continues with more space marines fun. In addition to Mars the action is on Triton now and it's a really interesting environment.
The writing, science, action and pace are good and I tore through the book. The ending makes me eager to read the next book in the series.
So... Why am I giving this three stars?
Many of the faults I found in this book are found in many middle volumes. The story moves quickly through sub elements to wrap up different topics and it feels occasionally a little forced.
The human side of the story is caught between the narrative of the space marine and the narrative of an open minded explorer common to science fiction and recognizable to the reader. This duality is back storied that the protagonist is a bored IT worker who became a space marine to defend earth and for excitement. This works well and creates a resonant character.
When the protagonist starts to change mentally to connect with the aliens it starts to break down a bit and some of the reader's connection fades. It's feels like it's really difficult to write this narrative and it manifests as a character we care a little less about.
Lastly, some of the fun science and mystery of the first book is diminished in the second due to the pressing need of the story to move forward. It's not bad but just a little sad.
Fans of the series will find much to like in this latest volume. Fans of military fiction should also enjoy this book.
There's lots of action in space and on the ground. The space battles were thick and inventive. Lots of expedient military style problem solving with enjoyable characters and faceless alien villains getting killed. It was a good page-turner and I didn't put it down.
As books like this go, it's a good one and lots of folk should enjoy it.
I had a number of issues with the book. Like Heinlein's women as either props to male characters or men in drag, Kris Longknife is an unauthentic woman. Her emotional dialog and physical relationship with her husband are seemingly pulled from the mind of a fourteen year old boy of the 1950's.
One of the central challenges in the story was the mining of resources feeding the construction of fabricators feeding the the production of military components. This felt like every space game of the last ten years and it received a lot of pages. The primary planet in the story had two really interesting types of alien people and they get less than a paragraph each.
The technical challenges are another large part of the story and they are repeatedly solved by convenient external forces and resupplies.
The worst are the religious zealot aliens who die in the faceless billions. One dimensional cardboard people who throw themselves onto the protagonist's spear with abandon.
I enjoyed the book as a continuation of the Longknife series but I would suggest an earlier book as an entry point.
I really liked this book. It took a fairly common sci-fi idea and extended it into a practical application that completely motivated the character and drove the story. At its heart, this is what I think of when I talk about great science fiction.
The action was fast and furious and tightly integrated with the plot. The exploration of a fantastic alien world was accomplished through the story and was not a bolt-on.
Seriously, I can't wait to see this author's next book.
This book has a number of things that work well. The political structure of the island state is nicely defined and illuminated through the protagonist's journey from peasant to divinely elected senate status. The adventures were interesting and I could not put the book down.
At the end of the book, the deficits are more on my mind. The antagonists seem very superficial and placed only to move the chapters along. The ultimate victory of the protagonist was abrupt and abreviated and too tidy.
More issues include:
The female protagonist written oddly by a male author. The character didn't seem to ring true.
The rape scene that seemed to be driven by the needs of the plot.
Interesting parts of the story happened off screen and exposition seemed to fill gaps.
A compressed feel to the story as if it were intended to be a multi-volume effort but something happened and it was compressed to a single volume leading to odd pacing.
I enjoyed the story but I can't hold it up as something I'd recommend.
This was a quick read with good pace and action. The magic continues to be interesting without being complex. It was not as strong as the previous three books.
The central story of a character figuring out the new world he's in is pretty good but it felt like the narrative surrounding his motivation was not very strong. Once he'd achieved his goal, the story ended awkwardly with a big battle and an abrupt wrap-up that effectively undermined the motivation.
This is an interesting book both in how it was written and the style. Large parts of the book were written as if the protagonist was making audio diary entries and not as much a story. It's an interesting vehicle and it worked mainly because so much of the story had only the one character.
I enjoyed the story and the pace. I had moments where I was really tired of the level of detail and other moments when I really questioned how well something would work. It was a book full of technical hacks and most of them were a good read.
Lines of Departure is a great military sci-fi novel. It felt very much like a middle novel and moved the story along from the first book, introduced some new alien baddies out to wipe out the humans and delivered a first victory against the aliens to wrap up the book.
I enjoyed the first book a little more for it's Judge Dredd style welfare state police force noir. Ultimately both books were solid page turners with great pace and action but were a little shy on concept development or coverage. I really had a hard time swallowing the idea that the method used to defeat the aliens had never been tried in hundreds of engagements.
I'm looking forward to the next book in the series and would very much recommend it for the guys version of the summer reading list. Lots of action and and running around in exotic locations.
Not sure how I missed this years ago. In some ways, it feels right at home in the early 80s. The plot moves assertively through time travel, action and magic with a pace that prevents the reader from asking any questions about how things worked or fit together. Today's books are so much longer and it's good sometimes to remember how short and fast science fiction and fantasy books were 30 years ago for publishers like Ace and Daw.
Very recommended.
It's hard to get into a book that kills off the protagonists right off the bat. The short story that kicked off this collection works. Expanding the story demands a lot of suspension of disbelief as the author kills off the protagonists without delivering any conceptual payload. The world creating just doesn't get the effort needed and only works at a superficial level.
Post apocalyptic biohaz suits with display helmets created after the fall of society?? Sometimes you really do need someone technical to review your work and provide suggestions and catch painful errors.
I really enjoyed Proxima, the characters, science and world building. The aliens on Proxima C were really interesting and novel.
I felt there were some issues with the premise behind the drafting of the colonials and it seemed like there was a substantial fiat to create the tone of the colonials as a rough group bringing their problems to the new world. It worked but perhaps it could have been simpler.
The book fell apart a little for me at the very end and left me feeling a little muddled. Overall very good with minor gripes.
It's hard to see this book with such few reviews. Ballantyne's AI trilogy quietly expanded the cannon of AI narrative without it playing second to the characters and narrative. If you haven't read this, you need to.
Fun spin on the ‘am I real or a shadow of the real' trope. There's good YA style space action to start and then a third wall mystery and at last a sweet little love story. It doesn't end with a bang but it was very satisfying.
I recall buying used copies of this book when I was a teen and leaving them at people's houses. I went back and read this again for the first time in 20 years and was very disappointed. The values and rhetoric of the book were superficial and tired.
The author contrives ridiculous events and perspectives to drive her character forward as if there were no alternative and the characters never develop their own voice or narrative.
It was tedious. So very tedious and narcissistic.