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A review by snowcrash
Corsair by James L. Cambias
2.0
I liked the author's first book, _A Darkling Sea_, so picked up his second without much thought. But instead of some deep thinking about energy security and hacking, it is a thin story populated by thinner characters. The book doesn't know if it wants to be a techno thriller, sci-fi, or a simple spy story.
The writing is light, so it was a fast read. The characters all exhibit a single trait and plumb that for the length of the book. The plot twists are minor and the plausibility of characters crossing paths is stretched thin. Descriptions of computer hacking are meant to impress the uninformed.
Even though it is supposed to be 15 years in the future, there isn't much for discussion on potential technology or societal changes. More self-driving electric cars, robots on the moon mining He3, fusion reactors, and everything is through tablets. But the world shock of commercial scale fusion power would be a trilogy on its own. Here, it is relegated to the background, mainly as a reason to describe spacecraft zooming around the L1 point.
The writing is light, so it was a fast read. The characters all exhibit a single trait and plumb that for the length of the book. The plot twists are minor and the plausibility of characters crossing paths is stretched thin. Descriptions of computer hacking are meant to impress the uninformed.
Even though it is supposed to be 15 years in the future, there isn't much for discussion on potential technology or societal changes. More self-driving electric cars, robots on the moon mining He3, fusion reactors, and everything is through tablets. But the world shock of commercial scale fusion power would be a trilogy on its own. Here, it is relegated to the background, mainly as a reason to describe spacecraft zooming around the L1 point.