Customer Reviews

Debatable Space

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I'm a fan of space opera, but the well-constructed Peter F. Hamilton or Iain M. Banks type. Debatable Space, alas, is not in their class ... far from it.

I skimmed the last 1/3 of "Debatable Space" because I couldn't stand to spend more time than necessary with it. I think the turning point was when, in a battle scene, one of the pirate fleet fired its laser weapons at the local sun, which then expanded and took a number of attacking ships with it (I'd have transcribed the exact language here, but I shipped the book off to Goodwill as fast as I could get it out of the house). There were about five things wrong with the believability of that sequence and it made we want to stop right there. But I perservered, through extended biographical detours and plot points that seemed to serve no purpose, to an ending that was anti-climatic and uninvolving.

I was fooled by well-done packaging and didn't due my usual due diligence before investing my time in the book. I should have been on the alert, since that same blurbage touts Palmer's radio and tv experience. I think there's a tendency among writers from those media to treat the vast amount of space a novel provides as a dumping ground for every idea they come up with. This is a prime example.

I read a lot of SF and Debatable Space is perhaps the worst thing I've read in a year.

But I couldn't finish this one. As a male who dabbles in mediocre story writing, I'm very afraid of writing female characters. The main female character in this book is exactly the sort of character that I'm afraid of writing.

I think the author broke just about every rule anyone has ever made for men writing believable female characters. She stays in a ridiculous abusive relationship, but she talks about how bad it is, so somehow that's supposed to make it okay. She's utterly helpless, but thinks that her "I'm just as good as a man" attitude will get her through adversity. She has odd conversations with her AI butler or whatever he is that come across as a lazy way of filling in background details.

I believe this is the author's debut novel, so maybe things will be better in #2.

Debatable Space is a rather banal, uninteresting space opera. The plot is silly and the characters are silly - and unbelievable. The book revolves around a group of space pirates who kidnap Lena, who they hope to ransom to the ruler of most of the inhabited universe, the Cheo (or Peter). Their ultimate goal is slowly revealed, but it's more than just a king's ransom they want. And while Lena has had a very long and interesting life, it too is unbelievable and a bore to read to about.

Given the drawn out plot, uninteresting characters that lack believability, and generally boilerplate storyline, I can't recommend this novel.

... complete and utter rubbish with no obvious redeeming features whatsoever. His characters are ridiculous, his writing style is just plain awful, the science is mostly non-existent and the story could have been told in half as many pages with greater effect. If someone told me Philip Palmer was 14, it would make perfect sense, but surely no publisher would touch a book this bad if it came from a teenager? It really is very bad, please don't waste your time or money. I only did because I was travelling in China and couldn't get anything else.
I was going to leave it at that but I can't, I need to tell why it was so bad. For some reason, he feels the need for his characters to achieve every imaginable goal - his protagonist does everything from packing out Carnegie Hall for a piano recital, through winning the Nobel Peace Prize to being personally responsible for the technology which makes living on other planets doable. That might be OK, except she has to marry some idiot who wins 400 Olympic gold medals in every discipline imaginable, which makes it completely over-the-top for no reason. Every character, even one who is killed off early on, has a similarly stupid, OTT back-story. It's childish. Maybe some of it would be funny in a Little Britain sketch but it comes out as just plain dumb in this novel. Apply the same level of maturity to the rest of the story and you get Debatable Space. My advice is to run a mile.

I found this book got excellent distance when it made me so angry I threw it across the room.

It's comforting to know that even after everything changes in this strange sci fi future, Africa will still be depressed, improvised, and able to be saved, single handedly, by a beautiful, intelligent American. All kidding aside, I couldn't even finish it, which doesn't happen often. I love my sci fi, but it should include something more than a Wikipedia-level knowledge of complex issues. I found this novel shallow, mindless, and pedantic.

There are other sci-fi's I would describe this way and yet enjoy. The difference is, they're fun to read.

I was suckered by the cover blurbs. Palmer takes what appears to be a plausible premise and mangles it unmercifully. This book purports to be SF but the science in it- especially in the physics of the space battle scenes is just astoundingly and painfully wrong. Many of today's better SF authors give parts of their manuscripts to knowledgeable test readers to verify the accuracy and plausibility of their science and technology extrapolations. Many SF authors consult experts in the scientific fields where their own expertise may be lacking so that, artistic license aside, the technological portions of their stories maintain some semblance of adhering to the basic physical laws as we understand them. It appears as if this is an alien concept to the author.
As my nickname implies, I read a lot of SF. I own over 1300 titles and have subscribed to Analog (Science Fiction and Fact) for over 30 years, so I have a passing familiarity with much of science and tech behind the stories I read. Palmer misses the mark in so many different ways that its mindboggling.
Honestly, if you're a hard SF aficionado like me, you'll be sorry you wasted your money on this book.
Emphatically Not Recommended.

This book has the capability to put you to sleep. If you take the simple uninteresting characters, the sketchy and almost non-existing plot and the copious amounts of impossible/improbable/totally unbelievable technology/events this book put me to sleep (literally) many times. This book is the literature equivalent of Ambien. The noticeable lack of care that the author used in this tedious story and the almost childish style of description (such as the battle scenes where the best description was just a few sentences stating the number of casualties) took all of the action and descriptive artistry that the book potentially had, and flushed it down the toilet.

The most annoying thing was the parts where the author used multiple pages to simply say "Anti-Matter Bomb" and "We are Plan B". Instead of wasting paper, ink, and the readers time, he could simply have said, in the poor style of the rest of the book "The flares (or whatever they used) spelled out Anti-matter Bomb.

In conclusion I would like to advise anyone who is considering reading this book, to stop read these reviews, and if that doesn't save them from death-by-Debateable Space, and you're still wanting to read this book then go to your library and check it out, DO NOT I repeat DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS BOOK.

I'm tempted to channel an old Bloom County cartoon where Milo is reviewing a book and writes something along the lines of "This is the worst thing ever written. There simply cannot ever be anything created that is more horrible than this. Entire civilizations will collapse when their citizens read this

Well, ok, it's not that bad, but it's sure not good"

There are a few good ideas in here, and his rapid cycling through first person viewpoints is fun for a while, but the book suffers hugely from so many problems it's not worth the slog

1) The main characters are not interesting, likable or even remotely believable. Lena has the maturity level of a 12-year-old, and Flanagan is a blank canvas to work against. The huge sections of the book devoted to "Lena, the great" utterly destroy the timing of the novel and sap any forward momentum it builds up.
2) He sets up a bunch of interesting characters (a semi-autistic navigator, several bio-engineered humans, etc) gives them a backstory and then simply ignores them for 400 pages.
3) The science is cringeworthy- he talks in an author's note at the end about how he tried to make the science work, but it's utter garbage- he doesn't understand physics in any way, shape or form.
4) The author's sex obsessed. Yes, sex can be used to help explain character's behavior and all, but I doubt there are more than 3 or 4 pages in a row without some reference to Lena sleeping with someone.
5) The worst sin: he keeps pulling out deus ex machinas to keep the story moving. I'll avoid spoilers, but the last few battles are resolved in ways that simply appear out of nowhere in the book, without foreshadowing or any indication that it's coming.

Give this one a pass.

The plot was incoherent and pointless, none of the characters were remotely likable and what happened to them was uninteresting. The setting was an arbitrary collection of random ideas without any logical relationship...if the author thought something was "neat", he threw it in without any consideration of how it fit or whether it made any sense at all. The "clever schemes" of the heroes were just thrown together with no apparent thought on the part of the characters or the author. Overall, the Palmer really didn't seem to care at all about what he was writing, just spewing out words and random ideas to fill pages. Some examples:

The characters use CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. They're spelled out that way. The author writes about technology like someone who's never used it.
The word "quantumarity". Yes, he used that word. This is fairly representative of the level of thought he put into most things.
Ordinary FTL comms relays that can produce horrifically destructive effects in not one, but two completely different but wonderfully spectacular ways.
Space battles with armies wearing jetpacks. Against warships.

Overall I was very pleased with this novel, it is an incredibly strong book for a first novel. Do not expect the fine prose of the sci-fi Grand Masters of the past because you will not find it here.

Instead what you will find is a well plotted out and reasonably well written space opera involving some very weird and at times distasteful characters and situations. The science is there for the most part(with a few wonky concepts that had me scratching my head) and the story only feels weak and contrived in a few areas. At times there is an overabundance of character development, but it all seems to serve some purpose or another even though it could have been shortened.

Even though this book at times showed obvious signs of being a first novel such as the occasional logical and literary hole I was left wanting to read the second novel Philip Palmer is writing. Despite any complaints I may have I would recommend this book, and I know Mr. Palmer's writing can only get better.