Customer Reviews

Disappearing Act

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

 

 

This is basically a very good sci-fi book. Set off-world in a distant, but familiar, future it is a story about power hungry people illegally trading bio-technology for arms. Those who accidentally unravel the organization are not necessarily motivated by good intentions. In their own way they plan to benefit from the illegal trade until the moral implications of the corruption disgust even them. Eventually, the would be good guys mend their selfish ways and overpower the bad guys for a happy ending. On the way questions are raised about the morality of colonization of new worlds, ethics of applying bio-enhancements to humans, and the acceptability of exposing advanced technology to developing societies. It had thought provoking moments even though it sometimes read like a coming of age romance. (After all, the lead character was 17 pretending to be 30.)

On the other hand, Disappearing Act was very poorly edited. The pacing was terrible. It took me 100 pages to figure out where the story was going. I could not tell if the title referred to one of the main characters, Calandra or Maris; or the political prisoners of Udara. There was too much detail, too much background on lesser characters, too many cultural observations... get on with the story already. And the names! I had a terrible time with the names of the characters and the places without a discussion of the meaning of the names. The last 100 pages was a bit of a "hurry up" ending. Details, so painstakingly included in the beginning, were suddenly skipped, and the time line became confusing. Even so, it was still a good read, a nice starting point for women reading science fiction.

This is a really good action story by Margaret Ball. Those of her novels which I have previously read have been fantasy but this one is science fiction.

The central character is an young orphan called Maris who lives on a space station where the only life available to her is to work for the boss of a criminal gang. The gang boss orders her to tail a woman who has been asking too many questions. Then the woman is captured by the gang, turns out to be a government agent or "Diplomat" called Calandra Vissi with all sorts of special abilities, and walks out of an airlock to avoid being forced to tell what she's up to.

Noting some resemblance between Maris and Calandra, the gang boss decides to provide the police with a body which they could mistake for Calandra before they can take the station apart looking for her. So he has Calandra's ID gimmicked to match Maris, and plans to fake her accidental death. Realising what he's planning, Maris escapes by catching the Diplomatic shuttle which Calandra was due to take to the primitive world Kalapriya.

However, Maris's problems are only just beginning. She has no training in how to pass for a diplomat, none of the enhancements which a real diplomat would have, and she hasn't been on the planet of Kalapriya for half a day when one of the criminals who Calandra was coming to the planet to investigate tries to assassinate her.

But although she isn't a real diplomat, Maris turns out ot bemore resourceful than anyone, including herself, could possibly have expected.

Delightful story with all the humour and charm one can usually expect from Margaret Ball.

The one warning I would give to anyone thinking of buying this, is that the racket the bad guys are up to is not just evil but seriously disgusting, and parts of this novel are not for the squeamish. Apart from that I can very strongly recommend it.

Margaret Ball's DISAPPEARING ACT tells of a woman who borrows a rich stranger's identity - only to find the woman is supposed to be bionically enhanced with abilities and weapons she can't possess. Intrigue and action follow.

Decent story about a teenage alley cat girl from a intersteller space station who is forced to masquerade as a "diplo" (sort of a far-future secret agent type), when she figures out her cohorts in crime intend to murder her and use her body in place of her virtual double, the diplo. So, using her new identity, she is able to get off the space station before she gets killed, and she is then forced to continue the masquerade on a strange planet, where she must ingage in all sorts of adventures in order to get by.

Drawbacks to the book are that there is no new SciFi technology introduced, and at times the story gets a bit too corny... especially the ending, which is almost "Disneyesque".