Another rip roaring adventure

Nick Adams is a storyteller of rare ability. His characters, worlds, and plots are perfectly paced and sprinkled with humour and boundless imagination. The crew of the Gabriel are becoming good friends of mine, I'm sure you'll them too.2 s Garry Whitmore294 3

Second in the series and slightly down on what came before. Mainly because the villains of the piece are a touch generic bad guys from another galaxy. Reading up some background on the author said he was influenced early by the Skylark of Space. You can see this in the story, and characters and for me, it's a good thing.

Going to carry on with the next volume as it brings back the more interesting villain from the first book. Plus we might learn more about the galaxy-spanning technology, and who produced it.

Also good to have British protagonists as part of the tale, can't always be Americans, can it.general-sci-fi humorous sci-fi-exploration1 B.4

They just keep getting better

I enjoyed this book better than the first one in the series. The characters are even more developed and they ran into more challenges. Great space opera!1 Brian Murphy8

Head long into the action....

No mucking around here, hardly had time to do up my seat belt. Easy comfortable read, looking forward to the next yarn1 Matt542 4

A good second book now what we know the characters, and I did appreciate the break from Xavier Lake1 Elroy Kez59

Another excellent book. Will be reading all of them1 Mark HebwoodAuthor 1 book96

Huh. I really d the first book in the series. Sure, the characters were a bit silly, juveniles in an “American Pie” movie, but the novel was basically a lighthearted bit of space romp. It reminded me of Harry Harrison and EE ‘Doc’ Smith, two writers I used to enjoy when I was a 14-year old.

But it is turning out that a fare of tried-and-tested space romp is not enough any more to get me through more than one book. So I gave up on page 400 - well, I made it through 80% at least. It wasn’t even that I disd it (for the most part anyway), I just stopped seeing a point in the adventure. So I stopped.

Plus there was something about how Nick built the villains in this novel that I seriously disd - detested actually. The villains are a race of devil lookas, and their most distinct behavioural trait is that they enslave women in their galaxy to serve as sex objects. There is only one chapter in the novel in which this trait is portrayed distinctly, but I could simply not get past it. I read on for another 100 pages or so, hoping that I would find the innocent banter again that I d so much in the first instalment of the series, but it turned out that the short chapter of SM-type misogyny had sallied my reading experience and I was unable to ignore it.

I must admit I think is harmful to portray women as powerless victims as it normalises male violence. It is also unnecessary to do so as in science fiction, we are free to invent any world we wish, so why not turn the tables and invent a matriarchal society in which men are subjected to such violence? Not that this would represent a more enlightened way to structure a fictional world, but at least it would not play into existing discriminatory social dynamics in THIS universe.

So, my one-star rating relates to this chapter of voyeuristic misogyny. The rest of the novel deserved a ‘meh’ rating, and without the offending chapter I would have left a rating of ‘unrated’.

Andrew Kanachowski4

I get it. The story is meant to be a bit of a lark, a light-hearted adventure. This, however, just verges into silliness. Deus ex machinas abound everywhere to the point of being ridiculous and some parts feel they’ve been written in a rush because the author was getting bored with the story. All-in-all, some parts are enjoyable but on the whole, it wasn’t a great read. Wilbur G. Lloyd, Jr.85

Fantastic

Best space war story I ever read. I actually hate books about wars and don't personally believe space warfare will ever happen and if it does there won't be many ships involved (except maybe civilian) and won't last more then 10 minutes. Barry Vandenburgh10 1 follower

great read

Could not put book down. Great,great great, great, great, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7,8 9,10, 11, 12, 13, Amlan Chatterjee25 2

Quite a page turner

As they say it’s unputdownable. Excellent story telling, great character building albeit a few too many sophomoric jokes, but quite a page turner.

Loved it. Kirby224

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