Okay Finished Steve Jordan “Verdant” over the weekend.
Overall
I enjoyed the book it had a good plot and a good story behind the book. I’m not sure if it was by design or just paned out but the main conflict of the books over immigration parallel closely to what the USA is going through today. He captures the desperation in what people are willing to sacrifice and resort to in order to provided a better living form themselves. Except the tables are turned here and it is US citizens that are desperately trying to get on the station. Unfortunately here is where Mr. Jordan didn’t expand on the topic, it was used more like a ploy to introduce conflict between USA and Verdant.
I think this book needs it’s own category called Soap-Fi, the sub plots felt more like a soap opera with betrayal, adultery, and dirty hidden pasts. All evolving around the main plot but with little influence on the story.
My main critique of the book was the climax of the book was not very climatic. It just didn’t work well. Here we have a satellite station that had no defense mechanism hold it’s own against a full onslaught offensive strike. True while the they where trying to refrain from hurting the station, they still could have disbanded with the Wasp very easily. The military today has pinpoint accuracy with it’s missiles, I would expect the future to have even more accuracy.
I also felt the climatic moment to just jump and never return was pretty anti-climatic essentially the story just came to a sizzle from that point.
On the style of Jordan, this is the fourth book/story I read from Jordan and do enjoy his style easy to read with a decent plot, humor and good character development. I guess the only negative I would add, and this is more a personal preference is that there is too much fluff added to his stories that do not enhance the plot or character development. Who knows maybe it’s a Jordan-ism, since another not so famous Jordan, author of Wheel of Time, tends add lots of fluff to his stories as well. This just tends to add to the size of the book and has the ill effect of dragging the story on.
Anyhow I did enjoy the book and wait the sequel
On a side note, I found out why I have a hard time enjoying Si-Fi, even though I have a scientific background… See its me!. What happens is once the author makes an error in the scientific explanation, I have a hard time focusing on the story and I start looking for more inconsistencies, which takes away from the book. In this particular book I had to suspend my knowledge and focus on the book. Yes I found myself grinding my teeth during the “Silver Drive” explanations and zip through it as fast as possible so I may not dwell on the science. This made the book enjoyable as I resulted on just enjoying the book.