2016 SF. Simon Forrester is rather forgotten beside his mother the
warship captain and his sister the space marine, even if he is
unreasonably good with computers. So he sets off to make his own way…
This is pastiche. It's RCN and more to the point Vatta's War
with the serial numbers filed off (though easily recovered via the
most elementary forensic techniques). Alex is very good at pastiche,
and he's clearly read the right sources, so when he mashes it around
and puts it back out in a slightly different shape what you get is
still something that's enjoyable. It's more of the same. It's
familiar. It's largely lacking in anything like originality, but if
you don't go in expecting that, it's fine.
So we've got the sexist society but it's gender-swapped, where men are
expected to learn estate management and attract a good wife while
women are politicians and soldiers and regard unmarried men as fair
prey. Which, yeah, fine, but it's all done in the easiest way
possible. Stewart doesn't want to write a story about a matriarchy,
and it's largely forgotten as soon as the story moves away from
Simon's homeworld, so just take standard 1950s stereotyped sexist
behaviour and invert it, job done.
Simon apparently suffers from Compulsive Behaviour (hacking), but
eventually manages to improve his control roll, presumably by spending
the experience points he gets from his first run aboard a space
freighter. (I'm being unfair; I don't suppose Alex plays GURPS.) And
some people like him and some people don't and he has a spying job to
do and things go wrong and some unfriendly people turn out to be good
really… tick tock tick tock no surprises.
Sometimes no surprises is what I'm in the mood for. Sometimes it
isn't. This can hugely affect how much I enjoy a particular book.
This is clearly set up to be the first of a series but no sequel has
been announced.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.