08 October, 2014

Review - The Fortress in Orion (Dead Enders #1) by Mike Resnick

Review #1:

"Hey guys, who wants to go to an impenetrable fortress on an impossible mission where everyone will certainly die?" says Coolguy.

"Me!" says Muscles.

"Me too!" says Thief.

"Of course! I don't need reasons for going on missions where I will certainly die!" says Powers.

"Even though you cloned me and I have no actual reasons for believing your society is better than my alien one, I too can't wait to go die!" says Clone.

Spaceship time.

"Wow, it's really dangerous out here, but somehow things are going really easy," says Coolguy, "we made it all the way here with not even a minor hiccup, but remember about the danger!"

Impenetrable fortress time.

"I can't believe how easy this is going, how is it so easy? we got into this impossibly impenetrable fortress without even one problem and we already got our badguy, but watch out for all the danger!"

Leaving impenetrable fortress.

"You guessed it, it's dangerous out here guys! How did we make it back to safety with what can barely be described as a slight stir? We're one crazy team of course!"

Review #2:

How this story should have been written: 
A group of people with different, yet exceptional talents are given a mission, which they perform flawlessly and without incident. 
In other words, the events of this book could be summed up in the beginning of the first page of another book, possibly making up an entire prologue, though that's stretching it still. I'm honestly not joking when I say this.

Review #3:

What started out grabbing my attention, literally from the first page, quickly had me completely baffled. This group of characters seemed cool and fun and then nothing happened. At first, I thought it was the author trying to quickly get from A to B because all the good stuff was going to happen at B. But then it didn't ... literally nothing happened.

Why would anyone need or want to read a whole novel about the lives of these people and this event that literally went off without a single hitch? That's not something for the history books ... for any books. It's obviously an important moment ... to capture in a blip, an epigraph, something besides a whole book.

Luckily it's less than 300 pages, but like I said at the beginning of this review #3, I kept thinking that finally something would actually happen. Something! Please, Mike Resnick fans, please tell me this isn't representative. I don't know if I can read any more of his work that's won Hugos and stuff. How, if this is the product? Let me know.

2 out of 5 Stars (I finished it so I guess that's something)

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

This review is perfect!

I've read Resnick's Starship series and really enjoyed them - they read similar to this and while the characters tend to get out of trouble, it's much, MUCH better than this one.