Outcast Marines (Boxed Set), James David Victor. I really, really wanted to both like this and finish it. Both objectives were ultimately out of reach. The concept seemed promising--I had been interested in comparing it to Chaney and Brazee’s Sentenced To War (here) given similar premises. The protagonist, a criminal fresh off of the untimely, unseemly death of his best friend, is judicially shanghai’ed into what comes off as a mildly futuristic penal battalion. All manner of intrigue and adventure ensue.
The adventure part was done decently, and it appeared some effort had gone into trying to write some verve into what’s going on. The problem was that I found it almost impossible to maintain my immersion into the story. Like a lot of what’s put out by volume-oriented writers (or writing teams) the product comes across as about one or two serious revisions short of what could have been really fun reading.
A couple of specific nits to pick:
· Technology: There is some sort of faster-than-light transportation available to humans, but the rest of the technology seems out of sync. At one point lead misfit Solomon is shot, through an armored suit, with what appears to be a 20th century bullet. Why is anyone using these when there are actual, you know, sci-fi weapons in the book? This is what I meant when I suggested the setting was “mildly futuristic”--there are hints of great technological advances, but they’re applied wildly unevenly across the story. Dune can (arguably) get away with this sort of thing, but it didn’t work here.
· Physics: There is a potentially great scene with dueling rescue ships arriving at the site of a calamitous incident. It’s undercut when one of the ships hails the other and tells them to move away...using a loudspeaker?
It was the Marine transporter. ATTENTION, MARTIAN VESSEL! The transporter boomed its message out across the Titan landscape. YOU ARE AN ILLEGAL VESSEL IN A RESTRICTED-ACCESS FACILITY! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO FIRE UPON YOU!
There is also a description of the ships entering Titan’s atmosphere which appears to confuse where all the heat from reentry would come from. This is too bad. Victor made an effort to be at least a little realistic in other ways. For example, specifying that humanity is short of the special FTL drives which are very rare and very difficult to build, therefore realistically bestowing a competitive advantage on the side which makes them.
· Character development/Plot: At least there is some! But a lot of it is stilted. From a critical moment in the story:
As much as she wanted to run down the ramp to find them, to drag them out, every hour of Marine training and before that her Yakuza training dictated the same thing: save what you can, what’s in front of you. Don’t throw your life away on an uncertainty.
“Save what you can, what’s in front of you” seems like an unlikely philosophy for either the Yakuza or an organized military. Particularly when both groups spend the first book executing devious and distinctly long-term plans around the main characters.
I was supposed to be the one to kill Solomon Cready, she thought miserably as she turned to follow the ambassador. She had also been tasked to protect the Ambassador to Earth. In a way, I’m still killing him by abandoning him down there. She gritted her teeth as she ran, blinking back the tears that had suddenly sprung into her eyes.
And her feelings about killing Cready appear less “mixed” than simply “confused.” This could and should be an important fulcrum for building some tension into the storyline, but it just comes across here as hastily-written.
Oh, and confession: initially, I thought these examples which came from a female character could simply be a male author who was uncomfortable extending their writing style to a feminine point of view. It turns out, not so much (see below).
· Clarity in descriptions: Two examples come to mind here.
Steam was escaping and being released constantly at odd intervals, and the strung lights flickered here and there as announcements in different languages beckoned staff to this docking procedure or that loading one.
This does create a mental image of what’s happening in the setting (a space station) but it’s a weird pseudo-Steampunk one which doesn’t match the rest of the story.
Computer systems and pipelines would have ruptured, creating a firestorm that only those in full protective suits could have survived.
Ruptured pipeline = firestorm. Sure, check. Would the computers have ruptured, too? Why? Are they spewing particularly flammable electrons? This is less about the physics or engineering than just being careful about the writing.
James David Victor…both of them!
To digress briefly, there is a really interesting point about this series: there is no James David Victor. Or rather, there is, but it’s not one person. JDV is a collective pen name for Shannon and Dave VanBergen, two authors with very different individual bodies of writing (Amazon says Shannon writes the Glock Grannies. These are “cozy mysteries” -- a sub-genre I can’t quite wrap my head around. But that’s definitely me, not her.) So that was mildly cool, and partly explains what seems to be “Victor” achieving such voluminous production.
Again, this isn’t a terrible series of books. It’s more like a good recipie which has been poorly executed: the basic pieces are there, but it’s been executed in a rush. Put another way, it’s hard to get and stay immersed in the story when there’s essentially a small papercut every few pages. At a staggering 1,317 pages that’s a ton of papercuts.
Smirk index: 7 uses -- Acceptable (1pt)
Immersion factor: Shallow (1pts)
Writing quality: Average (1pts)
Plot/character development: Average (1 pts)
Interest/innovation factor: Moderate (1pts)
Total: 5/10