The Wrong Genre

Title: The Wrong Stars (The Axiom, Book 1)
Author: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot

I picked this up as it came recommended as something that blended John Scalzi's humor with the planet-hopping action of The Expanse, but frankly the whole thing comes across as far more YA than that, with its lovable crew of misfits who spend far more time worrying if the other person likes them or not than about the discovery of an ancient super-powerful alien race that once enslaved the galaxy.

I thought perhaps I'd accidentally picked up some author's fanfic or self-published vanity piece. Oh dear, I did that once, and what I thought was an military SF space opera actioner with giant robots turned out to be My Little Pony fanfic. Poor me, settled down for a nice bit of stompy robot action and the narrator suddenly waxes on about how much he loves Princess Sparkles or whatever. Went hysterically blind in one eye for a week after that.

But anyway, no, Tim Pratt is an established author and senior editor at Locus magazine (though this does reinforce my cynicism about how inbred the SF/F publishing market is). Be that as it may, he's still written a novel that reminded me of the first third of the Starship Troopers movie with its charming but vapid and disturbingly violent heroes, without the saving grace of being a satire.

In the far future, a spaceship salvage crew discover a long-lost 'sleeper' ship of cryogenically frozen would-be space colonists (trope). The sole survivor is awoken and promptly spends all her time when not explaining the plot (viz, ancient super-powerful alien race, another trope, have kidnapped the rest of the crew) lusting after the captain of the salvage crew. 

That's the kind of thing I expect from BattleTech books, not from the pen of Hugo and Nebula award-winning writers. That's not elitism or snobbishness, that's saying people going into danger engaging in enthusiastic body-bumping because 'we all might be dead tomorrow' or whatever is a corny, hoary cliche. 

Here's one character after the team has, over the course of about three paragraphs, boarded a pirate asteroid and then blown up their fleet: "Damn. How turned on are you right now?"

A rescue operations is mounted, filled with sequences like having the characters figure out how to use millennia-old optical controls by just, like, winging it for a few seconds. There is a singular lack of tension and drama, and whatever minor, low hurdles Pratt can bear himself to put in their way are all easily hurdled like Superman on the moon.

There is at least the attempt at banter and humor, thankful for small mercies etc., but much of it isn't especially funny, and it isn't enough to rescue this mashup of the Bachelorette and H. P. Lovecraft in space from utter silliness.

This is touted as 'Book 1' of a series because we as a culture seem congenitally incapable of producing self-contained stories these days, so there's more of this coming, if that's your thing, but it isn't mine. 

So there.

Speaking of books that aren't very good, I gave up on "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. Classic of the genre (1966) and all that, but the narrator is written in this faux-Russian influenced English, like Star Trek's Chekov looking for the nuclear wessels. As I said in the review of Ancillary Justice, gimmicks with language drive me nuts. Didn't make it past chapter 1.