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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Weak for Modesitt, March 4, 2007
This review is from: The Elysium Commission (Hardcover)
I like Modesitt, despite this unfavorable review. A prolific writer, he has invented a variety of universes, each a bit different, and he writes good economic- and politically-based science fiction. The quality of his writing can be pretty variable, and he cannot write a love scene to save his soul. But I still enjoy most of his books.
But I had to work to even finish this one. The premise is promising: a male private detective in a society run by and whose royalty are women. But that premise is never fully developed. The private detective/protagonist also has a Dark Knight role, but that's never developed, either. He doesn't take assignments; he takes commissions. Hence, the title. And he does, indeed take the Elysium commission, even if he only figures it out afterwards. The rest of the novel is similarly fragments and undeveloped. The protagonist, as another reviewer has noted, is yet another iron-grey-haired guy who wears black a lot.
And when the plot drops into military action at the end, you won't be the only reader who wonders wear that came from.
Modesitt has written far better books. For example, the recent "Eternity Artifact" is superior in every way. This is a clunker.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ok worldbuilding, lousy plot and character development, March 5, 2007
This review is from: The Elysium Commission (Hardcover)
The Elysium Commission is not one of L. E. Modesitt's better novels. I take a star off each for POV storytelling that is confusing, a plot getting wildly sidetracked for 80% of the book before making any sense, and a protagonist that seems to be a composite of any of his other science fiction standalones. I'm going to be generous and add back one star for some fairly interesting concepts in worldbuilding, so three stars.
The world he creates is certainly different. Protagonist Blaine Donne lives in what seems to be a terraformed future world based roughly off of Italy and France that is dominated by the rich, ruled by women, and where nanite technology and societal acceptance allows routine enhancements ranging up to sex changes to those who aren't comfortable being themselves.
Unfortunately, that's the only good part. The narrative is both confusing and badly developed. Donne is yet another one of Modesitt's repetitive retired Special Ops types (of course, also a pilot) who has become a private investigator in his medical retirement. Modesitt makes an unusual mistake for a writer of his experience in spending most of the book away from the main plot of what exactly the Elysium project is by investigating Donne's other cases, and then compounds it by throwing in occasional POVs from the nominal villain that make utterly no sense until he finally reveals at the conclusion what the villain had intended all along. Character development is stunted, with Donne's occasional Batman appearance as the "Knight of Shadows" never explained, his familial and client relations barely explored, and Donne's motivations just don't make a lot of sense - if he's doing this for money, why is he willing to effectively spend almost 3 million for 20 grand, let alone where did he get the 3 million to spend in the first place?
Modesitt's typical one-man-conquers-all-and-gains-love-interest formula doesn't get used until almost the end, and while it may be a repetitive one it also normally works more or less as it does here. Unfortunately for Modesitt, the rest of the book doesn't. Modesitt is an unusually good fantasy and science fiction writer, but not in this book.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not his best, March 22, 2007
This review is from: The Elysium Commission (Hardcover)
This is one of the very few Modesitt books that I've been disappointed in. And I own, and have read, everything he's published with the exception of the Ghost books - which seem to be out of print or otherwise unavailable. Enjoyment of this book was further reduced by my having just finished reading Flash; and the Elysium Commission is pretty much a retread of Flash; but murkier and not as well-told a story.
The setting is only marginally different than Flash - it's a different world and nanite technology is less prevalent, but other than that there are no meaningful differences. The main character, Blaine Donne, is a 100% retread of the Flash's Jonat DeVrai - but more bland and less interesting. Another villian, another plot to foil... Modesitt has a tendency to cloak his villian's plots and the motivations behind them for a big reveal towards the end of the story - but in The Elysium Commission, I found that I really didn't care. The 'danger that must be thwarted' was so weakly explained that it was impossible to really get behind the hero's desire to stop it.
And there were some huge glaring plot holes in text. The worst among them is Donne's "Knight of Shadows" subplot - where it is apparently an open secret that he goes out and does the vigilante bit. It was such an open secret that one minor character goes so far as to say, "I wanted to see what a shadow knight looked like" - or something to that effect. And cryptic references to another type of Robin Hood-like character didn't help. In Flash, the main character manages to retire from the military with certain sensory enhancements intact; in EC Donne's manages to buy, equip, and maintain a near military aircraft with everyone giving it a wink and a nod - think a Stealth Fighter without the missiles.
Lastly, Modesitt has an extremely annoying habit in his SF writing - and that is creating and employing new words and acronyms and not supplying a glossary at the end of the book. This is an unforgiveable sin, and can make reading his work difficult and extremely annoying. I'm not sure why he does this; because this trait is not apparent in his Fantasy writing, where he goes out of his way to explain how things work. It's not uncommon to go 1/3 of the way through a book before he finally drops enough hints to let you figure out what a word actually means. In Flash, he finally resorted to one of his chapter opening "study reprints" he seems to be so fond of to explain one term; and in EC it's even worse.
Do I recommend this book to you? Only if you are a hardcore Modesitt fan - and only read it if you haven't read Beauty and/or Flash recently; there are far too similar and EC doesn't compare favorably with either.
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