PG's Books

“Bof” as the French say. Normally I would like this kind of book. The United Coalition of Earth has been invaded and we’re following the crew of a spaceship in the coalition fleet. To spice things up the coalition have just invented a cloaking device which they hope will give them an edge against the superior attacking forces. Sounds good, right?

Unfortunately, the book is not very good. Although the story and the ingredients are promising it really fails to “take off”. It’s really choppy with chapters of fairly uninspiring space battles interspersed with lots and lots of conversation between crew members which are dull and uninteresting.

There’s really no connection between the battles and you never really get the feeling that they are part of a whole campaign leading towards an ultimate goal. In the second half the already outnumbered coalition forces learn the news that another bunch of space empires have declared war against them. That should really seal their fate since the coalition was already outnumbered but somehow it doesn’t.

For no good reason a conspiracy theory is also introduced in the second half of the book which also really doesn’t lead anywhere. Then towards the end of the book I guess the author got bored with writing since suddenly and without any plausible explanation the invaders just give up. What the f…?

The fact that the author starts to spew out a bunch of anti-free-market political propaganda in the middle of the book doesn’t really help it. I gave it two Goodread stars since it’s not the worst one I’ve read but that was really barely. I was thinking about giving it one.