Customer Reviews

Article 23

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It is a good book for entertainment but cant said to be a good literature. It may even be in the category of "children sf books". For teenagers I would highly recommend but for adult sf lovers no need to read.

Article 23 is the sequal to Star Voyager Academy. Justin and Matt have finished their first year at the Academy. This book is about their "Test of Fire", an idea you may be familiar with from Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Jerry Pournelle's Birth by Fire, or Rick Shelley's DMC series.The characters end up serving as "Third Lieutenants" under an insane tyrant. The Captain's wife left him years before and joined the colonial movement, in revenge he abuses and punishes anyone not born on Earth. The inevitable conflict forces them to choose between duty and honor. It is an entertaining, original story. I know that the concepts are not new, but Mr. Forstchen's telling of them is. The story flowed and the plot was NOT predictable.This novel is an enjoyable, quick, smooth read. It is the kind of thing that I have come to expect from this author and I consider buying this book money well spent.

This story harkens to the "Horatio Hornblower" novels as much as Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." A well-executed read that should be a good introduction to the genre for young readers. If you want to give the gift of science fiction to a young reader, this book or "Star Voyager Academy" is an excellent start. I enjoyed this book for no other reason than it was not a dark and depressing future. That vision, unfortunately, comes in the third book of this series.

Written as a book for juvenile SF readers, I still enjoyed it at age 50. This is the kind of book I'll give to my daughter when she's a couple of years older.

Similar to many coming of age stories, the characters have to work their way through lots of hurdles from their own personal inadequacies, the societies' problems and action/peronal danger.

I just finished re-reading Star Voyager Academy, I'm about to go through this one again. I'm hoping it's true that there's a third in the series.

Excellent for kids. Relaxing and pleasant for adults.

Fortchen's second installment in the "Star Voyager Academy" series is a good one!

This isn't high art, but this relatively short book will certainly entertain the reader.

I look forward to the next volume.

The first half of this book is overly predictable and preachy. Every character has pages and pages of long exposition that drags, making me want to toss it aside and quit reading. What kept me going was how much I liked the characters in Star Voyager Academy and I wanted to see what happened to them. The second half picked up a lot and had some intrigue to it, even if it was still fairly predictable, it was nice to just root for the main characters.

I also wondered what happened to the falcon fighting. That futuristic sport was one of the things that made the first book. In this one, it recieves a mention (going by falcon flying) and is completely displaced by the skyhook diving which is really just extreme skydiving and not nearly as interesting. There were no mentions of the evil Trac aliens either.

This wasn't a bad read, but nothing to write home about unless you really care for the cast.

Not having read the first book, I can't say if this sequel was better or worse than the first. However, as a standalone novel, I was disappointed by this book. The plot was juvenille. In the end, I did not care about the characters or their plight.

I've never read a book with am more predictable, mundane plot than Article 23. About half way through the book I began to wonder if it was written for younger readers. The idea of using towers to climb into space was interesting, yet served no useful function in the book besides being a unique way of getting the characters into space. I got so fed up with it that around 2/3 of the way through, I had to skip to the end just to be done with it. Of course, the ending was exactly what I expected, making me glad I did not waste any more time reading the book.