Author: WC Bauers
Publisher: Macmillan under its 'Tor' disguise
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This is book one in the inevitable series, because no one can write a YA stand-alone novel any more. It hits pretty much every trope there is in YA sci-fi. This one even has the word 'Chronicles' as a part of the series title! Any series with 'Chronicles' in the title is more-than-likely to be a disaster. The only word worse than 'chronicles' for a series is 'Cycle'. This is 'The Chronicles of Promise Paen'. That looks like 'Promise Pain' which is just dumb. The author might have chosen a more distinctive title, especially since there are some nine pages of books titled "Unbreakable" or something similar on BN.
Young Promise sees, from afar, her father shot by aliens, and though she's armed, she never tries to shoot them in return. Even after the aliens leave, she doesn't go down to her father to see if he might be still alive. That's the kind of callous person she is, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she joins the military. OTOH, if she is so cowardly, whence the impetus to join the military?
This attempt at a prologue in chapter one made no sense. The weird thing is that there actually is a prologue, too, which I skipped. I skip all prologues and I've never miss a single one of them. If the author doesn't think it's important enough to put right there in chapter one (or later), then why should I think it's worth my time to read it? The funny thing is that chapter one is itself a prologue! It actually begins, "Six years earlier..."! I laughed at that. The first half-dozen chapters essentially convey nothing of value, and the first one is nothing more than a big 'show' up front instead of a subtle 'tell' included later in the story. Indeed, you could actually begin reading this novel at chapter seven and not really miss anything of real utility.
This novel is sci-fi, set in some moderately distant future when interstellar travel is supposedly and routinely possible - yet Promise's father is a farmer. He works his butt off, yet they have robots. Of course, this is sci-fi, so the author can’t possibly call them robots. They have to be called 'mechs' because that sounds way cooler. There is something fundamentally flawed in this scenario, but it worked for Star Wars, so why wouldn’t the same re-cycled idea work here, too? It’s easier than thinking-up something original, and this novel has very little originality. It's essentially David Weber fanfic with the standard trope of an orphaned child doing good. The child is named Promise instead of the Mary Sue that she really is.
A Star Wars motif is rife in this story: they have a republic which spans multiple planets ruled over by a senate. Yep. Nothing original here at all, and no thought whatsoever given to how dumb is the idea of trying to have a republic of planets and a senate to rule them! This kind of thing completely ignores how insanely MASSIVE space is, and how tiny and insignificant are the stars which sparsely dot it. I see this in way too many sci-fi novels. You can’t rule space. It makes no sense at all, yet we get story after story which makes this claim while simultaneously offering nothing to back it up.
Like I said, we’re hitting all the tropes here - youthful orphan, sci-fi buzz-words, unit pulled out of training because of a "crisis in the rim". That's like "trouble at mill", and Promise's toon has to go because of trouble stirred-up by privateers. Yep, they’re not platoons because that would be too normal; here they're toons, which I laughed at every time I read it. I have to add that I'm not convinced that the author understands the distinction between pirates and privateers. I love sci-fi when it’s done well, but when all you get from it is a pirate story that just happens to be set in the future, then it's as depressing as it is boring.
Right now in this day and age, we have remotely-operated flying drones which can see activity on the ground and even deliver death. Why would they need to send out a 'toon of rookies', especially since this is set in an unspecified future time? The complaint running through this story (at least the part which I read, is that there isn't enough MAN-power to police space, Well duhh! Hello? There never will be! But when you can build robots and drones, then why is this even an issue? It makes no sense.
We're told that for once, in the future, we do have robots - sorry! Mechs! - but apparently the mechs are really dumb. It makes no sense. Of course, if it’s all done by robots, then the human element is either reduced or gone, and for some reason authors really have trouble telling stories with no humans in them.
It’s nonsensical to have space pirates. The distances are almost unimaginably massive and the potential rewards are completely insignificant compared with the prohibitive costs when factoring in the distances and time involved. Even a simple flight into orbit from Earth costs millions of dollars. How are you going to make a living out of piracy in the vast emptiness of space? I have yet to see a sci-fi story that even tries to make sense of this.
The author's grandfather was in the US navy, and doubtlessly he was influenced by that, but he was apparently most heavily influenced by sci-fi author David Weber who did this same thing - and initially did it a lot better. I was a fan of Weber's Honor Harrington series for about five books; then it became so dull and tedious that I couldn't stand to read any more of it. The author had become completely obsessed with discussing naval military strategy (a 2D glue-trap which absolutely does not apply in 3D space) and obscure political systems, that he forgot that he was supposed to be actually telling a story!
Just like in David Weber's series, in this novel there's a bureau of medicine named BUMED, and a bureau of personnel named BUPERS both of which made me laugh even more than I'd been chortling already. The spacecraft are named, and classed and treated like ocean-going sail ships. There are 'battleships' and 'corvettes', and there's endless military pomp and bullshit on every other page. We no longer have battleships in our time because they are obsolete. Why would they build them in space when they could be completely destroyed by a drone which costs a thousandth as much and needs no crew? Every few pages I found something new (which really wasn't) to turn me off this novel, and I was getting ready to DNF it before I was 20% in.
This trouble at mill is on Promise's own planet of Montana of course - yep, named after an American state, because why not? We're told that the planet is poor, yet a page or two later we’re told that it has a respectable gross product and little poverty! Huh? So the short version is that I got to just over a quarter the way through this, saw what an insane little Mary Sue this Promise character really was, choked repeatedly on the endless David Weber style bureaucratic bullshit, and finally said, "Enough already, I deserve better than this!" I can not recommend this novel, not even a little bit.
