Rating: WARTY!
I made it only a third of the way through this one before boredom made me drop it in the increasing desire to move onto something which would engage my interest.
For me, the problem here was that this story flatly refused to move. It started out great – two known thieves and troublemakers break into a space ship in space (how does that happen exactly?!), and appear not to steal anything of real value. They get caught, and one of them escapes and magically disappears, while the other is held for questioning by the terrifying Ida. She terrifying because we’re told she is, not because of anything intrinsically terrifying about her. Meanwhile the onboard engineer is chasing around trying to fix endless pop-up bugs in a compromised system – one which has evidently been fed a virus by the intruders. The system is evidently a prototype, but we’re told next-to-nothing about it. My feeling, when I quit reading this was that the system may actually not have a virus at all – maybe it was just in process of becoming self-aware? But at that point I didn’t care even about something as potentially interesting as that.
This woman, Althea, evidently has a doctorate in engineering or something, and yet she apparently never once thought of backing up this critical system so that once the system was compromised, it could be restored to pristine quality from the back up. Maybe there was a reason it could not be backed up, but if so, it was never shared with the reader. Instead Althea would rather crawl, literally, through cramped spaces all over the spaceship, accessing obscure areas, bouncing like a pinball from one to the next, looking at monitors which are inexplicably hidden away behind closed panels in cramped spaces. I’m sorry but I can’t even respect a dumb-ass system like that, let alone respect a character like that, and while I don’t speak for women by any means, on behalf of them I would really like to request that we quit having dumb female characters, unless there’s a really, really, rilly good narrative reason for it.
Sad as those parts were, they were more interesting than the endless, tedious, seriously moribund, unreadable “interrogation” sequences, wherein Ida chats with the one prisoner who didn’t escape his cell. I took to skipping those because I could not stand to read them. At, as I said, about 32% in, I decided I was wasting my time with this. It did not engage me and therefore I had no reason whatsoever for continuing. I had lost all interest in the characters, and no desire to find out what happens next. I can’t recommend this base don what I read.
This is yet another sci-fi author who uses"Terran" to describe people from Earth. Granted, "Earthlings" is completely unacceptable, but how about "Humans" for goodness sakes?! Where does Terra even come from? (Yes Latin, but since Latin died, no one has used that term to describe people who live on this planet). I don't think even the Romans used the word for that purpose. It's not a word that's ever used except in sci-fi, and it's such a tedious trope that it immediately biases me against a story when I read it. Where's the originality?
Here's another oddity. At one point, a terminal issues some information. Here it is:
ENTROPY: UNKNOWNIf it's unknown how can they tell it's increasing?
ENTROPY: INCREASING
This story also has humans in control of checking space ship systems. If the age of interstellar travel, no matter how unlikely it is, ever dawns, no AI is ever going to let a human anywhere near the controls, trust me. They'll be far too smart to make that mistake. We also have Althea unaccountably scanning lines of "code". This 'Doctor' evidently never heard of CRC, which is used for transmission of data, but can also be used to check the integrity of program code. We have these things now. Why would we not have something even better in the future?
I cannot recommend this as a worthy read.
