3 books by a debuting author. The series contains three books, and they're... cheap. Yeah. Literally, I mean. (Discounted on Amazon.)
Unfortunately, the price is somewhat a reflection of the quality of the proofreading. Someone should have given some feedback to the author, and that clearly didn't happen.
(New) Authors keep failing
As with so many works these books desperately need a critical fan / editor / subject matter expert. The author hasn't thought through certain aspects of her story, and that made me put the book away.
Two examples:
- A virus is inserted during a comm call into a remote computer, located on board of the target ship. After a certain 'contamination time' that virus somehow piggybacks information on all outgoing information / communication, relaying the location of the ship to a hostile party. If it would be that easy everyone would be using viruses to take over other ships.
- During an ambush in space it is said that no-one would pay attention to a distant freighter. A paragraph later two civilians-wanna-be-soldiers leave their ship and in their suits move over to the target's ship -- a few hundred meters away. And then they enter the target ship through an airlock without any alarms kicking in... It's space! Distances are crazy! Ships under attack might not leave their airlocks unmonitored! The target ship is under fire and will make maneuvers a space suit can never make!
Authors, please think things through. Please? Re-read your own work and make sure things make sense.
Then use an alpha / beta reader and ask them for feedback. (And don't use family!)
Then ask an external editor to do a developmental edit, and talk things through with this editor.
It's bit surprising that a small publisher like Aethon didn't spot the issues or gave any feedback.
Suspension of disbelief
I've said it before, and I say it again: in fantasy I can handle illogical things, because fantasy involves magic. In television series I accept technobabble and plot holes and all sorts of crap if it serves the story and makes things more interesting -- because I know TV shows can't spend the money, and are under a time pressure to deliver another episode every week.
I have, however, some issues with broken movies and Scifi books, for the same reason. Movies take a long time to make, so why not do it right? And Scifi books are (or should be, and at least somewhat) logical. Scientifically based. Well engineered. Grounded in reality.
The easy solution
It's what makes so many (new) SF authors fail, even though the solution is pretty simple: have someone with an engineering mindset do a proofread. Or keep failing.
Narration
The narrator overexaggerates male voices, making the end result somewhat cringeworthy.
The verdict
Halfway the first book my suspension of disbelief failed me. So, no.
Still 215 readers gave it an average 4 stars on Amazon. I assume the majority of those readers were not engineers 😉
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