Colony Launch is an okay novel. If you're looking for some reasonably interesting character drama, you might find it satisfying, but my final thoughts on it were unfortunately not great.
From a plotting perspective, Colony Launch is about four separate story threads that come together very slowly. It takes nearly half the book for three of them to stick together, and the fourth only joins up right at the end.
Of the several main characters, I thought that Antony Lemkin, former politician who resigned his position for moral reasons, was the most interesting. To my dismay, most of that interestingness was not very well explored.
Whenever we're in the shoes of Morgan Ezra, we get lots of vividness, but most of that comes from PTSD.
Dalton Ward, a crooked businessman, is intriguing at times, but too much of his development makes not enough sense--what did he do in order to get thrown into maximum security prison?
The Tarantula, a veteran-turned-prison-gang-boss, is too nebulous to be really interesting. He seems highly psychotic despite his military background (you'd think the military would weed people like him out), and this connection is not too well-justified.
The last two main characters, Kiyomi and Fabio DePino, are too distant to really grab the reader's attention. Kiyomi in particular seems to "float" through the story.
Character descriptions are pretty weak, with an overall sense of blandness pervading them.
The worldbuilding is okay, with lots of mild dystopian elements: a poorly run prison system that mixes violent and nonviolent prisoners is one; another is the government and media having the ability to cast 10,000 people attempting to start a faraway colony as "traitors."
The alien foe, the Aryshans, are far too ignored through most of the book, only to appear right at the end for no clear reason.
One of the main elements of the plot, the incorporation of 2,000 prisoners from a maximum security prison planet into the colony population, is fare too blithely treated. We can dig out some justification from the character of Fabio DePino, but the negotiation of this point is way too simplistic and short-lived.
There are also some significant problems with how the Spider Clan managed to organize the falsification of records that almost certainly were not wholly contained on their prison planet. For this to work, there would need to be some kind of massive conspiracy that doesn't really seem feasible.
As far as the science fiction elements go, we get almost no technical details about the colony ship other than a few buzzwords: "crystal drive," "cryo sleep," and "disposability."
Their journey is estimated to take 100 years at a faster-than-light rate; just how FTL are we talking? The Milky Way is about 90,000 light-years in diameter. Yet we see people go from system to system in a matter of days or weeks, and those systems might reasonably be dozens or hundreds of light-years apart. In other words, the density of habitable worlds seems a bit clunky.
Moreover, the star system that they are heading to has already been scouted by an unmanned probe--how did it get there so fast, and how did it report its findings in the face of the "strange EM radiation that blocks comm signals" that is described in the story?
It's a mystery box that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
When we think about the 10,000 people (Now 12,000 with the prisoners? Or are they kicking 2,000 useful people off the ship?!) heading out to start this new colony, you'd think they'd aim for the best of the best, but that seems to not be the case, considering how little competition there was for the position that Ezra eventually got!
An element of the plot near the end is that the Aryshans unexpectedly attack the Ark. Why? How did they know it was there? It's another mystery box with no satisfying answer.
In the end, Colony Launch is too lacking in intriguing characters, too glib about the political machinations that could have been really fun and illuminating, and too fuzzy about the sci-fi to be really enjoyable to me. It's full of mystery boxes that don't get answered in this book, but the book itself didn't sufficiently motivate me to care about reading the next one. It is a serviceable space drama, but not much more than that.
However, if you want to check it out, follow this link.
No comments:
Post a Comment