Bretta, Henry Martyn's daughter, is ejected from her spaceship and left for dead by her father's enemies, but the resourceful Bretta makes her way to a world of escaped slaves, where she vows revenge."
Bretta Martyn (Henry Martyn)
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For the swashbuckling space opera Bretta Martyn aspires to be, it is slow paced, dawdling with the interstellar politics of the "Deep," that region of space claimed eons ago by humankind. Smith, a libertarian, opines on all manner of Machiavellian schemes, often cleverly, so that reader interest is sustained. Nonetheless, the pirate Henry Martyn (of Henry Martyn [1989]), now a reluctant farmer, climbs aboard none too soon. He receives a message from his old mentor, Lia Wheeler, that the dread Oplyte slave trade has resumed, and embarks once again to fight for freedom. En route, his 15-year-old daughter, Bretta, is cast overboard, as it were, managing to land on an asteroid world of escaped slaves. A half-wild, fierce thing, Bretta soon rises to captaincy of her own ship and a fledgling career as a pirate. Smith's ornate manner almost obscures a plot very like those of the Star Wars movies, but he gets there, nonetheless, often with great good humor. John Mort
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bretta Martyn combines Sci Fi with Poli Sci!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bretta Martyn (Henry Martyn) (Mass Market Paperback)
In Bretta Martyn, L. Neil Smith reprises his earlier book, Henry Martyn, by weaving the tale of how the notorious space-brigand's young daughter, Bretta, grows from rambuctious tomboy on a rustic frontier planet to a strong-willed, battle-hardened leader of refugees and sacker of evil empires. All this, and more, takes place over 1000 years in our future, in a galaxy populated, predominately, by human beings who sail the Deep in starships romantically similar to those which once plied the oceans of long-dead Earth. In much the same way as he did in his popular book, The Probability Broach, Smith manages to weave a beautifully fantastic tale of fast-paced adventure and imaginative technology while, at the same time, delivering a strong treatise on the evils of Federalism and the glories of a laissez-faire, free-market system. Political value aside, Bretta Martyn is a fabulous yarn guaranteed to activate every last emotion in any reader, and spark the imagination of young and old. :)
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I Loved the book Bretta Martyn !!!!!!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bretta Martyn (Henry Martyn) (Mass Market Paperback)
I really liked this book. The back made it sound as if it were going to be different, but the way it turned out was just fine, too. I gave it 4 stars because the book was a little slow in some parts, and I did not like how the prologe/epilogs were written, but other than that, it was a pretty good book.
0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bretta Sucks,
By
This review is from: Bretta Martyn (Henry Martyn) (Mass Market Paperback)
Bretta Sucks: A Review of BRETTA MARTYN
_____Folks, I have certain hopes and expectations every time I pick up a new science fiction novel. To start, will it have a decent writing style, being written coherently at least? Will the plot kick butt and maybe have some originality? The characters, are they worth following? Those are the kinds of questions dancing through my mind as my fingers pinch the opening pages of any novel I buy outright or borrow from the library. It's too darned bad that these expectations keep getting thrashed, dashed and smashed every other time they come up against something written in the genre. It's enough to make a person leap from the side of a ship piloted by space pirates. _____For those of you still guessing, yes-sir-ee-Bob, BRETTA MARTYN is yet another horribly written piece of junk from the post-1990s generation of science fiction writers, yet another bad book. There are just so many things that the book does wrong that I barely know where to begin. The writing style, oh yeah, that is almost always a heaping helping of Hellish trouble for post-1990s sci-fi writers, and BRETTA MARTYN has a writing style that sucks in that regard. Plot construction with this novel also sucks. For goodness' sakes, half the book is spent with the characters doing nothing but dressing up and swapping gossip! More on that later. A mutant space-caveman in a tunneled-out asteroid could do better, even while sober. _____I'll begin with where the crap-flow gets its start: the writing style. Inherent in the writing style is the narrative--which is very badly executed. Something gets described, okay? Then it gets over-described some more. Yeah, and then the narrative tends to mutate into rants about the whole darned history of how the thing was made and where it came from... Like we care about each and every little nook and cranny pertaining to every little item in the novel; just get on with the story already! So it is not only that the narrative must talk and over-talk about items in the book, it is worse still when the narrative won't shut up. It is not only redundantly redundant, it is redundancy to dunce-like redundant proportions, redundantly speaking. _____That is not the worst of it. Worse is when the narrative is even more redundant still, going back over the same items we were told about earlier in the book. You could be a good hundred and fifty pages into the book when the narrative will bring up the exact-same subject matter back near the beginning. In fact, things that should really have been said near the beginning are later said nearing the end. The beginning of a book is when you're supposed to lay out all the mechanics and workings of your sci-fi universe (the rules), along with introducing your characters and what-not. It is called setting the stage... Come on; even a college freshman in creative writing knows that! This scattershot--if not scatterbrains--approach to narration just grates a person's sensibilities. _____Is it really that bad? Consider the evidence. For example, the workings of those THRUSTIBLES weapons--which were introduced way back near the beginning--are further described nearing the end of the book. How about another example? Well okay, also consider the sails on the starships' sails in the book. A reasonably educated and experienced sci-fi reader would go mentally cross-eyed in confusion as to how a freakin' sailing vessel in space can achieve speeds worthy of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise. Uh-huh... (Theoretically, photon sails are possible, but they're slower than Grandma Moses on Ritalin to start, and they need loads of starlight to get a move on.) So the author waits until over halfway into the book before telling us how that works--a barely convincible rigmarole pertaining to captured tachyons and other subatomic particles interacting with the materials of the sails...or whatever. Again, why couldn't we have had our introductions and explanations given up front and out of the way as so we could get on with the story? _____Maybe it was because the author just kept writing and didn't figure out how his own book was working until he was almost done with it. However, this is assuming that the book itself works at all. One of the biggest logic errors in the book came nearing the end, which ought to have broken the book anyway. When the author described the force-field thingies that every spaceship uses to get through space (double s-mark fields or something), he wrote that they shut down any and all electrical conductivity inside. Come on now! Impulses in the nervous systems of terrestrial organisms are electrical impulses. The human nervous system is one of the biggest billions-deep collection of electrical connections--some permanent, some done on the fly. Yeah, so the magic force-field thingies would kill all the people on the ships when it stops their nervous systems as so the book can't happen at all: The End. _____Have you heard enough about how broken the book's logic is? But wait; there's more! When the titular Bretta Martin herself starts zipping around on those mutant manta rays through space without a space-suit, we are again not told the HOW or WHY until lo-o-ong after the fact, when we're let in on the secret that those mutant manta rays also have double s-field thingies.... (Uh-huh...) Did I fail to mention that we don't meet the character Bretta Martin herself until chapters and chapters into the book itself? The upshot of this all is, the wards-back approach to storytelling in the novel BRETTA MARTYN could have been fixed by simply using the cut-and-paste functions found in even freeware word-processing software. It's...not...hard! _____Besides the narrative sucking, there is also the problem of the writing style's mechanics--overblown, over-stuffed, OVERLY DESCRIBED. It is wordy, what I mean. You'd think that this book is from the bad old days of Charles Dickens when writers were paid by the word. There is just too much fluff and stuff. Even the individual sentences are so chock-full of wordy badness that they burst with things that ought to make a paragraph. Some of you people are probably thinking that I'm just talking out the wrong end of my digestive tract in making this claim. Doubters ought to consider this sentence from the book, from page 106 in the TOR hardcover edition: _____At her slender waist, swinging from the wide leather belt which had been her first handcrafted project, hung the very knife--its broad, spatulate, gleaming-edged blade exactly as long as her littlest finger--which she had, all by herself, flayed, field-dressed, and quartered the antlered forest animal from the russet skin of which she had fashioned her vest and slippers, sewing them with dried gut. _____That is just one sentence, ONE SENTENCE. I actually had to go back twice and make sure that all of it was copied too, hoping that there was actually the mercy of some terminal punctuation somewhere in that mess. The overly stuffed and stuffy writing is how the book is throughout. It does not get as bad as the above-mentioned in all cases. This is also saying that the writing mechanics only get less bad in places and are never good. That sentence was a real hum-dinger of wreck, yet it was a wreck among wrecks. Stephen King once commented that he writes like a fat lady diets. The writing style of BRETTA MARTYN not only goes like how a fat lady diets, it also eats the fat lady sitting beside. So, get the fork out of the way before the writing style eats your sanity. _____I maybe said too much about the humanitarian violations put forth by the writing style. Now if the writing style by which the plot is delivered is bad, would it be a believable statement that the book's plot is just as horrible a thing to behold? Oh dear gosh yes, the plot is horrible. It is inconsistent, haphazard and of varying flow. It is also unoriginal and a real pain to put up with. It's really, really bad, and I'm so overwhelmed with the badness of it that it's temporarily hard for me to coming up with other adjectives to use. That could also be because the writing style in BRETTA MARTYN ate my thesaurus after eating the fat lady. _____Consider the inconsistency. It is as if the plot itself is jam-packed into the last half of the book, with nothing of much worth happening beforehand. We could maybe chop out the first hundred pages of Bretta Martin and still not have the quality suffer. It is because the characters do almost nothing noteworthy up until halfway into the thing--besides giving birth to who is allegedly the main character. The characters spend most all of their time behaving like blonde-haired millionaire hotel heiresses most all of the time: dressing up, sitting around at social gatherings, having sex, going to even more social gatherings, and talking about the time they chopped off some noggins with a giant bread-oven spatula. So this amounts to hundreds of pages with characters getting together and sitting around in to just talk about how awesome they are. This book was advertised as being a swashbuckling space adventure or something--about a rebellious girl and her downtrodden buddies getting together to make things right. I don't want to deal with over a hundred pages of people going to costume parties and behaving like the hotel heiresses. (Skinny blonde what's-her-name didn't chop off anybody's head with a giant culinary instrument as far as we know, but can we really put it past her?) It was painful going reading this generally constipated plot, and relief is long in coming when things finally start happening...after page 120 or so. _____Yeah, and Bretta's space-mutant underdog rebellion doesn't start until the girl herself gets mistreated in a way that happens all the time in... Read more ›
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