Members of Goodreads and random browsers of book reviews, I come before you today with a confession. I am a literary masochist, I continue to read book series long after any sane person would have moved on to greener pastures. The series that caused me to truly realize this aspect of my reading habits is unoriginally named “Star Force.”
tl;dr – This series is bad, really bad. Do not read it, do not even start it, find something better to read. For more details, read on.
I have been curious about this series for a long time, watching books one through one hundred come out between 2012 and 2016, then watching the series continue into phase two. I finally decided that it was a good idea to check it out. Imagine my surprise when the first “book” was a mere 42 pages on my eReader. I hadn’t realized that this was actually a serial, with each “book” being an episode. So naturally I went to find a combined edition.
That’s when I discovered the omnibus collections, four episodes in one. This brought the page total up to a whopping 216 for the first four episodes, which to me is a short story, not even a novelette. But of course I’m used to series like The Wheel of Time, The Stormlight Chronicles, The Sword of Truth, Dune, and Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy. These are what I consider “Epic” Science Fiction and Fantasy.
As is my habit, I keep a loose count of grammatical errors that I encounter when I read a series. I give new authors, especially new ebook authors, a bit of a pass on this since often they can’t afford the services of a copy editor. This series started out decently, but actually got worse over the course of the twelve episodes that I managed to get through.
I’m not going to lay out every issue that I saw, but here is a list of a few.
Constant misuse of “Less” and “Fewer”
Using “Thrusted” as the past tense when referring to rocket engines
Using “Haven” when the situation calls for “Heaven”
Misusing “Too” and “To”
“Backwards Engineered” (It’s Reverse Engineered)
The grammar is actually what caused me to give up on the series, over and above the reasons I will detail below. By the time I finished episode twelve, there was at least one misuse of a word on every page, sometimes two. I can take a lot, but as with the “Wandering Engineer” series, I just could not get past the language issue.
Moving on, I can suspend a great deal of disbelief when it comes to a good story, but the concepts introduced in this series stretched me near to the breaking point. If the grammar didn’t get me, the super-tech dinosaurs would have. Here is a short list of things that made me cringe when they appeared.
Super-technological dinosaurs. Yes really, somehow we’re meant to believe that the Triceratops and Apatosaurus somehow advanced to a high technological level and were in competition with Velociraptors, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and all sorts of other reptilian species.
If that’s not bad enough, Humans aren’t actually from Earth, they were brought there as slaves to the dinosaurs. Conveniently ignoring the thousands of skeletons that were unearthed without any trace of high technology laying around. Also, Earth humans circa 2044 are sad and pathetic examples of the species.
The secret to immortality and super-humanity is training, not mere exercise, but focused training. There’s no need to grow old and die, train and you will reverse the aging process. But wait, there’s more, if you take this special wonder-vitamin called Ambrosia (which by the way is the FOOD of the gods, not the NECTAR of the gods. Nectar was the drink of the gods) then you can achieve levels of training that will catapult you to super hero status.
Oh, and as a side note, now there are seven foot tall humans called “Knights” who take special growth enhancing drugs and carry giant stun swords. Because bigger is better apparently.
Somehow it is possible in the physics of the Star Force universe to generate a full 1G of gravity using a disc the size of the U.S.S. Defiant of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame (I’ll get to that later). The Coriolis effect of a disc that small spinning fast enough to generate 1G of gravity would be unreal. I’m letting the larger ships go, ignoring the size requirements for generating 1G of spin gravity, but that was just stupid.
Now that I’ve covered the things that stretch credulity to the breaking point, for my final segment I will list the things that are just plain irritating about the episodes that I read.
The author cannot write female characters, period, but to his credit he has decided that females only make cameo appearances with one notable exception. The one female that gets more than a few lines at a time is Morgan, who is a serious badass. I love Morgan, she’s great, but she’s also not a definably female character. Other than the initial description and referring to her in the feminine pronoun, you’d never know. Oh, with the one exception of someone asking her to take off her helmet, then saying that she’s hot. Yes really.
The constant referencing of 20th/21st century television, movies, and video games. There are “Halo” tournaments, they play Mario Kart, there are constant references to Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonball Z, BattleTech, and a few other “popular” shows and games. If you can’t make your descriptive point without referencing an existing work, you need to work harder.
The battleships of the Star Force fleet are named after video games. Not games that could be reasonably thought of as ship names, but rather the battleship Smash Brothers, and the battleship Mortal Kombat. I just can’t take an author seriously when he does things like that.
In the span of approximately sixty years since the discovery of the super-tech dinosaur ship under the ice of Antarctica, there has not been one single leak of Star Force technology, or even a hint that the ship exists. Star Force employs millions of people, hundreds of thousands of engineers, but somehow they managed to hire only the people who will keep their mouths shut in the face of massive amounts of money offered by rival companies. I don’t think so.
There are countless other things that I could talk about as reasons why I stopped reading this series, but I think my litany of annoyance has gone on long enough. Thank you for reading, and I wish you luck in finding other, better books to read.