1992 SF, first of its series. Mistworld is a marginally-habitable
planet, but it's the one place Imperial Outlaws can go without being
at constant risk from bounty hunters. The Empire is not happy about
this.
This is apparently the first of a prequel series to Green's
better-known Deathstalker series, and I was recommended it by a
friend. I didn't like it much, but it's not bad in the way of much of
the trash I read.
We open by being introduced to several characters in various
vignettes, and it soon becomes clear why: they immediately start to
kill each other off, and by the end of the book, the overwhelming
majority of them will be dead.
I'm told this series is intended as parody of fifties thud-and-blunder
science fiction, and perhaps it is, but for my taste there's an awful
lot of the thud-and-blunder and very little of the parody. Every
female character is described in terms of how attractive she is (and
all but one are gorgeous), none of the men. Several named characters
are introduced and don't even get to do anything before they're killed
(shades of The Duchess of Malfi). The influence of Warhammer
40,000 is very obvious, including an Empire that casually destroys
worlds without warning for reasons of its own. Part of a spaceship is
described as
a single vast chamber of ribbed steel a hundred thousand yards
square
and I can't help noticing that Green's just said this one room is
fifty-six miles to a side, even though the ship has landed at a
starport where people walk from the perimeter to the landing pads. (If
it were a hundred thousand square yards, that would be a bit over 300
metres on a side, which seems more plausible.)
But there are bits that do work, and that's why it doesn't quite earn
my In Brief Avoid tag. Green's writing is generally competent, if
heavy on the adverbs. There's some serious consideration of how a
world can (just barely) keep its tech base going, even though it has
no legitimate trade and relies on smugglers bringing what they think
they can make most profit by selling. The terrifying Imperial assassin
makes things much worse for everyone, including himself, by
assassinating the wrong target, twice.
In the end I'm afraid I didn't enjoy it. When these people aren't
stabbing each other in the back, they're shooting each other in the
front. The rare energy weapons run off a crystal that takes two
minutes to recharge (so that you can use them just once at the start
of the fight, like flintlocks), and apparently nobody has ever thought
of having two of then; you have one, you're rich, that's enough. The
whole world clearly exists to be a grimdark scaffolding for these
desperate struggles for survival, and I'm just not in th mood for it.