Scan barcode
A review by futuregazer
The Heart of Matter by Evan Currie
1.0
Just bad.
Objective complaints: Awful editing that left a lot of confusing plot jumps hanging off of each other, simple and boring sentence/paragraph structure with oft-repeated words, lack of characterization or moving the plot forward, no payoff for any of the small interesting setups in the first book as of yet, and the entire book was basically once again concerned with a single battle's description.
Subjective complaints: Boring, lack of interesting characters, treats science fiction as if it's all ray guns and green blob aliens, author makes multiple jokes about "how weird/impossible/typical events of the book would be if it were read in a science fiction book" with the characters conspicuously mugging at the reader (honestly, all this does is all attention to how bad/dull these exact tropes are when used IN THIS SCIENCE FICTION BOOK), author continues to be heavy handed about their military philosophy to the point of preaching rather than exploring at all, no time is given to anything potentially interesting about the alien civilization (the only real screentime it is given is for various alien characters to consistently misunderstand translations of common Earth idioms), all the hints of unusual technology continue to go unexplained, and all the alien technology is "magic" science fiction (ie, not only wrong explanations or unlikely explanations, but no explanations followed by hand-waving. Very anime).
It's a bad book. Not going any further with this series. I was interested to see where the author was going with a few ideas in the first one, but the answer turns out to be "nowhere fast".
Objective complaints: Awful editing that left a lot of confusing plot jumps hanging off of each other, simple and boring sentence/paragraph structure with oft-repeated words, lack of characterization or moving the plot forward, no payoff for any of the small interesting setups in the first book as of yet, and the entire book was basically once again concerned with a single battle's description.
Subjective complaints: Boring, lack of interesting characters, treats science fiction as if it's all ray guns and green blob aliens, author makes multiple jokes about "how weird/impossible/typical events of the book would be if it were read in a science fiction book" with the characters conspicuously mugging at the reader (honestly, all this does is all attention to how bad/dull these exact tropes are when used IN THIS SCIENCE FICTION BOOK), author continues to be heavy handed about their military philosophy to the point of preaching rather than exploring at all, no time is given to anything potentially interesting about the alien civilization (the only real screentime it is given is for various alien characters to consistently misunderstand translations of common Earth idioms), all the hints of unusual technology continue to go unexplained, and all the alien technology is "magic" science fiction (ie, not only wrong explanations or unlikely explanations, but no explanations followed by hand-waving. Very anime).
It's a bad book. Not going any further with this series. I was interested to see where the author was going with a few ideas in the first one, but the answer turns out to be "nowhere fast".