Steven Piziks

To be perfectly frank it took me a long time to get through this book. The concept had me highly motivated to read it as soon as it arrived in my hands, but the beginning slowly ate away at that excitement till I put it down after about four chapters and moved onto a new book. The writing is okay--I haven't read Harper before, but I have read quite a bit of steampunk over the last few years. Harper definitely combines the two worlds in a believable way, but spends so much time trying to immerse the reader in it that the info-dumping becomes really tedious really quickly.

It wouldn't be quite right to call this steampunk with traditional zombies either. The 'Clockwork Plague' victims that becomes zombies don't feast on the flesh of humans and except for the machinations of the villain don't attack humans either it would seem. They're just kind of there. The steampunk aspects are solid and inventive--plenty of cool and nifty gadgets running around (some of the Clockwork Plague victims become genius inventors until they burn themselves out and go crazy), but as I said earlier Harper spends a lot of time info-dumping to make the gadgets seem cool. More often than not we are told how cool the gadgets are and when presented with the reality in action, it's taken care of quickly and as dryly as possible.

The romance subplot was also dry. Alice is torn between wanting to do right by her family and her obligations as a daughter and wanting to do just about anything else in her life. As a consequence her romance with Gavin is put on the back burner. Not that Gavin is any better, he detests London and is only there because of his nominal interest in Alice (or so it seems). Their lack of clear communication on their wants is a real sticking point throughout the novel.

More than anything else however the novel drags on. The moments of excitement are ruined by over simplification or too much information or over much too quickly to gain much momentum. In the end this was just unsatisfying and not very enjoyable to top it off.

Review originally posted at Night Owl Reviews… (meer)

I don’t usually do this, but I’m abandoning this at about the halfway point. Because of that, I’m not rating it, but I will state my reasons for not finishing.

This one had potential, but it all seemed wildly unexplored. The alien race in question, the Chiar, with their ever-changing colored coats, reminded me of My Little Pony creatures, for those who can remember their kids playing with these. It was well written and breezy initially, for about the first 100 pages or so, but it seemed like an entrée, and while I kept waiting on the main meal to be served, it didn’t seem to be on the menu.

There are some somewhat interesting aspects to the beginning of feelings between Chakotay and Seven of Nine, and a few other things, but that’s all it seemed like to me — a book filled with somewhat interesting or enjoyable asides without a main story big enough or worthy enough to turn them into actual asides, tangental to the big goings on. Once Tom and Seven are kidnapped by these creatures, and we get into the slave stuff, Tom’s interaction with the Chiar, and some superficial stuff with the nano technology, I just felt like I was at a table filled with entrées and desserts, but no meat.

I simply lost interest because the story that might have been here, was never fully explored. It’s the only Voyager book I picked up recently that I felt was a bust, all the others being fun reads. At 330 pages this was way too long for a Star Trek story in paperback. I began thinking this was more suited to a comic book or graphic novel the longer I read, which was up to about page 170. I skimmed through sections from that point forward and it seemed just more of the same to me. It may seem strange to use the term superficial to describe a Star Trek book in paperback, which are mostly for Trek fans, but that was how I felt. It fools you at the outset however because it’s smooth and well written superficial. But that’s all it is.

I probably would have been generous to give this one three stars, but a lot of other people seem to love this one. It wasn’t my cup of tea at all, however, and I have some better stuff to read, so I’m abandoning this one, and calling it a day.… (meer)