RogerBW's Blog

Edge of the Future, Andria Stone 03 April 2023

2017 SF/thriller, first of an ongoing series. Mark Warren is a researcher in a top secret facility which gets attacked by terrorists, and things spin out from there.

It's sort of mil-SF at times, and there's a lot of manly friendship through mutual beating each other up. But it ends with the main characters all leaving the military to set up their own faster-responding organisation.

The villain (who is the only female character who is not breathtakingly attractive, because she's fat and middle-aged and fat) can already take over anyone who's had a neural implant (quite a lot of people), but her goal appears to be to steal research on how to do terraforming and how to build cyborgs, and then she's going to terraform one of the outer planets and colonise it with said cyborgs. (Some people might argue that this would also be a breathtakingly expensive proposition, but they aren't in this book.)

Women are always "females", and men are usually "males". Women like chocolate and shopping.

There are three moon bases and a substantial presence on Mars, and there's been one expedition as far as Europa. Spaceship crews don't seem to worry about fuel (a trip to Mars is aborted in mid-flight and they just turn round and go back to Earth), and in-atmosphere shuttles can be casually diverted from a hop of a few hundred miles to a trip to orbit, but humanity hasn't got any further than that.

It's tremendously important that we know, as we're told several times, that the interior lights in a shuttle change colour to blue when it takes off. No mention of what colour they are at any other time.

All of Earth's militaries have joined into one organisation. (But not their respective governments?) Whom are they expecting to fight?

A forensic test of your genetics can tell that you're of Brazilian descent, and that must mean that you live in Brazil.

There are lots of errors of language (the author claims to have a BA in Liberal Arts from UCLA). Someone is "a combat ER doctor imminently qualified to treat" someone else.

This is first draft stuff and it's not good first draft stuff. An editor or a co-author might have salvaged the interesting bits and made a good book out of them (and I kept reading in the hope of more of those interesting bits), but that didn't happen.

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