PG's Books

Before I start I better point out that this review do have some spoilers in it concerning the ending.

I was quite looking forward to this, the next book in The Frontiers Saga. I have to say that it did not live up to my expectations. If this was a TV-show this book would constitute the last episode with the sole purpose of preparing the viewers, or in this case the readers, for the next season. As such the ending is pretty much a huge cliff-hanger. This I guess I could live with. It was not really surprising since it was said already that the series should contain about 15 books in all.

I was hoping the Aurora would, finally, be coming back to Earth with some of that improved technology and that we would then embark on a new story arc where Earth would build up their fleet and start to defend themselves against the Jung. Instead, even though the Aurora did get back to Earth (briefly), what we really got was a last minute kind of “reboot” that throws the Aurora back as being a lone ship not really knowing what to do or where to go. This time she is at least not shot to hell but instead almost out of “fuel” for the engines. This was just so arrrrggghhhhhh! I was really not happy after the last page. It feels like we are just going on the same, or at least a similar, type of story all over again.

The rest of the book is unfortunately not very exciting either. There is little actual action. Instead a lot of the book is spent on testing the new engines and harping a lot about it, harping a lot about whether they were going to be court-marshalled when coming home, doing a detour and finding an old colony ship with a mysterious survivor.

The only action, apart from a little shootout at the end, is when the captain is devising a ludicrous scheme for sending a lone fighter into a Jung hornet’s nest which, of course, goes bad. This is my second gripe with this book. The captain is in a hurry to get home so Earth can defend itself and he carries technology that is vital for this effort. Yet he makes one ridiculous decision after another delaying and even endangering their trip home as well as endangering the technology in question to the extent that it might fall into enemy hands.

This book really felt like one of the lesser scripts in some mediocre TV-show. Not exactly what I expected. If I could have given it two and a half star I would have.