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Prometheus | Rating | |
| B | |||
| William R. Forstchen | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | Star Voyager Academy, Article 23, Prometheus | ||
Jason Bell has made it through "scrub summer" in which something like a third of the introductory cadets get scrubbed off the roster. He and his friends are now first year plebes. This means an increase in schoolwork and responsibility. It also means that they can get extra duties and classes. In this case, Jason, Mark, and others are assigned to an aging cruiser for a short stint on a supply run to Mars for some "real world experience." But it's looking like the experience the academy's head, Thorsson, wanted them to get won't be all they learn. The captain is paranoid and anti-seperatist to a near fanatical degree, and one of their fellow plebes feels the same way. The two amplify each other's fears and hatreds until all hell breaks loose on ship.
Near the start of the book, Thorsson's speech welcoming in the students back and signalling the start of another session is rather repetetive. Not within itself - it doesn't ramble and retrace its steps in any significant way - but compared to the last book. This is, with very little modification, the same one with which he welcomed the "scrubs" last summer. He even admits, in dialogue and not just narration, that this is more or less the same speech he gives every year. Does that mean we'll have to listen to it a third time in the next book? After all, if he says the same thing each year, students, and thus readers, will hear it six times! While this may be how things run in real academies, for a book it is a bad choice. I felt the author would have done better to avoid it. Most readers won't wait a year between books, and therefore between speeches. Repeating how space is the new frontier, and new frontiers cost lives and money, and how this will benefit all despite the money being "wasted" on expansion instead of social programs back on Earth, thus seems like heavyhanded prostheletyzing for more money spent on space programs in the real-life here-and-now.
I also found the dialogue a bit strained at times. People tend to give lectures to explain some bit of history, either for the character or the setting, a lot more often than I've ever heard in real life. It's a reasonable technique to avoid doling out expositive lumps, but some are oddly placed or outright inappropriate. I simply found it unbelievable - in the truest sense of the word - that, for instance, on a supply run Bell is regaled with a lengthy explanation of a certain religiously-oriented space station's benefits to society, and then they take an hour to sample the apple brandy the order ferments on station.
The first third of the book also suffers badly from a feeling that we just read this. It is simply a retread of the "trying to pass tough classes" that comprised a majority of the last book. There is even a new extreme sport that they engage in to give the area with a bit of spice, in the same way that the zero-gee playoffs punctuated the last book. But after they get on the ship headed to Mars, things improve considerably. The steadily rising tension is handled fairly well, each scene adding to the powder keg in some way that is not in itself dangerous but, thanks to the personalities involved, a clear escalation.
The story was, unfortunately, utterly predictable. There were no twists, no surprises in the entire book. I could tell every character's role as soon as they were introduced. No event was a shock, not even at the end when the Service is investigating charges and countercharges amongst the crew. The resolution is almost a foregone conclusion.
Fortchen added tension and, eventually, action into an otherwise ordinary tale of a cadet learning how to be a leader. But the flaws are unfortunately not ignorable. The predictability of the action on the ship and the similarity of the time in the academy before it to the plot of the last book, severely hurt the novel, in my opinion. This is a good continuation of affairs from Star Voyager Academy, but I would hope that any further sequels start taking this in a new direction.
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