50 in '08: 10
May. 14th, 2008 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76Title: East of the Sun, West of the Moon
Author: John Ringo
This is the fourth book in his "Council Wars" series. Now, I've never said they're good books. But what they are is rip-roaring potboilers. I have sped through each of the first three; they have about as much nutrition as candy corn, and disappear as quickly. This one felt... lacking. Worse, it felt mechanical. My biggest beef with it is that it feels like the author carefully did all his mapping out and planning of the plot, the spaceship, the battle, complete with 3x5s pinned to a cork board and color-coded sticky notes... and then that was what he wrote. The play-by-play outline, with occasional attempts at smut and/or titilation (sometimes both! did I mention the nymphomaniac ex-harem girl?), that utterly confused me (me not having a handy map of the spaceship to refer to) and left me wondering why I was supposed to care about any of these characters or their mission succeeding. Hell, I ended the book not knowing who was still alive. This is not a good sign.
Part of the problem is the aforementioned lack of map. Part of it is timing: two-thirds of the book is spent doing set-up for a mission/battle that fails to pay off that set-up time. Part of the problem is carelessly killing off various characters throughout the book with no reaction from other characters. Part of the problem is taking what's been a mildly tech-enhanced medieval world and all of a sudden saying "spaceship! with space suits and zero-gee battles! nifty, oooh~". And part of the problem is the author's, hmm, shall we call them "fetishes" leaking over even more from some of his other series that I've not read, but read the reviews and discussion of.
So, in short, read the first three books in the series and skip this one. If you want sci-fi space battles, read Bujold instead.
Author: John Ringo
This is the fourth book in his "Council Wars" series. Now, I've never said they're good books. But what they are is rip-roaring potboilers. I have sped through each of the first three; they have about as much nutrition as candy corn, and disappear as quickly. This one felt... lacking. Worse, it felt mechanical. My biggest beef with it is that it feels like the author carefully did all his mapping out and planning of the plot, the spaceship, the battle, complete with 3x5s pinned to a cork board and color-coded sticky notes... and then that was what he wrote. The play-by-play outline, with occasional attempts at smut and/or titilation (sometimes both! did I mention the nymphomaniac ex-harem girl?), that utterly confused me (me not having a handy map of the spaceship to refer to) and left me wondering why I was supposed to care about any of these characters or their mission succeeding. Hell, I ended the book not knowing who was still alive. This is not a good sign.
Part of the problem is the aforementioned lack of map. Part of it is timing: two-thirds of the book is spent doing set-up for a mission/battle that fails to pay off that set-up time. Part of the problem is carelessly killing off various characters throughout the book with no reaction from other characters. Part of the problem is taking what's been a mildly tech-enhanced medieval world and all of a sudden saying "spaceship! with space suits and zero-gee battles! nifty, oooh~". And part of the problem is the author's, hmm, shall we call them "fetishes" leaking over even more from some of his other series that I've not read, but read the reviews and discussion of.
So, in short, read the first three books in the series and skip this one. If you want sci-fi space battles, read Bujold instead.
