RogerBW's Blog

2016 SF/romance, second of of its series. Fiona Russell has also been kidnapped from Earth into an alien civilisation…

There's a certain inevitability to the framework, perhaps innate to the premises of the series, with most of the aliens at least subconsciously thinking of the human as some kind of experimental animal and only the hot captain falling for her and having to convince everyone else; but where this got interesting for me was where it broke away from its template.

The action takes place mostly on a large space habitat, and Diener has fun with the sorts of thing that can go wrong there (deliberately or otherwise). The science is very soft, of course, but one does at least get the feeling that there are rules and even powerful characters can't just magically make things right again.

There's relatively little romance in this book, and while the SF plot is interesting it can't carry the whole story. Fiona gets some characterisation to separate her from Rose, but new hero Hal is basically old hero Dav with a different command.

I didn't love it, and the continuing use of "airspace" for "territory" still rubs me wrong, but I'll try at least one more.