If you ever thought “where‘s the pedestrians flying around, the heavily injured innocent bystanders that get mowed down? Incredible!” while watching typical movie action scenes… this book is for you.
If you’re thinking “I like that positive, liberal, open-minded spirit of Star Trek”… this book is for you.
…if, on the other hand, you’re not really into an author injecting endless psycho-babble into the proceedings, this may not quite be to your liking. The main character first has extreme and continuous and debilitating qualms about collateral damage, leading to a painful self-questioning inner discourse and at times idiotic behaviour (imagine Superman discussing with himself for hours on end whether… should he fly, or – oh, no! – smack the bad guys?). And when that – inevitably – got old, the author put an all-out evil voice into the main characters’ head, through a surprising backstory-insertion. Plus, the newly acquired lover of that main character also has an evil voice… not quite in her head, but as an AI voice only she interacts with, close enough.
This is all way beyond the usual inner voice literary monologues, I’d say Schizophrenia definitely is a main theme going on here, and for much of the time of the book. I guess the author simply has problems writing believable characters – he doesn’t want to dim down the bright sparkle of the good girls/guys or lighten up the darkness of the bad guys, so you end up with bright characters with schizoid tendencies. The real kinda dark characters somehow stay flat, anyways… too little time left to dive into their schizophrenia, maybe?
The most astonishing thing is how the author, despite all of this, still executes on a plot and directs some action, and presents a sympathetic and fitting cast of characters milling about, who are thankfully mostly unaware of all the inner bs.
So, it could have been better – honestly, it was really a lot of time to spend on this nonsense. It’s kinda okay…but… unfortunately, my evil inner voice now… tells me to give only 1 star, and… I… I… must… must… obey the voice!! But wait, my good self thinks I should be nice and give 4 stars, so I will do that as it’s the right thing to do… but no, my evil voice… be good… be mean… aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhh!!!
(One more star deducted for about 5+ hours of elongated happy end)