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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good adventure,
By BrianS "BrianS" (California) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Oxygen Barons (Ace Science Fiction Special) (Paperback)
I don't consider Feeley a great writer but this is a great futuristic/space adventure. I read this back in the early '90s and the concepts still hold up today, though some are a bit aged now. I bought the book for my collection and am glad it was still available.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Adventures on a terraformed Moon,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Oxygen Barons (Ace Science Fiction Special) (Paperback)
`The Oxygen Barons" (1990) is one of the last books in the Ace Science Fiction Specials Series 3, which was edited by Terry Carr; following his death in 1987, Damon Knight took over the editing duties. It is unclear which of them was responsible for handling this book; neither Carr nor Knight were ardent enthusiasts of hard SF, in which `Barons' could be firmly categorized.`Barons' is set several centuries in the future, in which the inner Solar System has been colonized or exploited for raw materials, which are delivered via mass drivers from one outpost to another. The Moon has been terraformed and possesses a stable, breathable atmosphere and a network of rivers and large bodies of water. Its government is divided between two feuding factions, the Nearside and the Farside. These polities are loosely confederated with a variety of offworld corporations and trading blocs who are vying for power among themselves. A particular bone of contention is the extravagant amount of oxygen needed to sustain the operation of the Moon; there is a move afoot on the part of some of the offworld corporations to divert its oxygen for use in sustaining other colonies elsewhere in the system. As the novel opens, a Nearside engineer named Galvanix is attempting to prevent an opposing faction from driving an asteroid into the Moon. He finds unexpected assistance in his task from Beryl Taggart, a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier. The first half of the book is one extended chase sequence as Taggart and Galvanix find themselves stranded on the Farside, fleeing its hostile authorities in an effort to retrieve an important database lost somewhere at the lunar pole. The novel then moves to a large space station orbiting the Earth, and from there, to the Earth itself and an entire floating city anchored off the coast of India, as the various entities referred to as the `Oxygen Barons' engage a series of maneuvers designed to bring a hapless Galvanix under their control. `Barons' does have its moments; every few pages another `gee whiz' moment rears its head, and the physics of living and working in low-grav environments are accurately represented. But overall the novel is a rather mediocre effort, and badly needed better editing. Feeley's prose is very dense and overly descriptive. For example, in one segment of the narrative Galvanix has to ascend a narrow shaft embedded belowground in a lunar installation. Most authors would deal with this segment within a paragraph or two, but Feeley spends nearly two pages on the event, turning it into a sort of prolonged mini-epic. The novel is clogged with too many of these instances of over-writing. The backstory involving the political and economic conflict surrounding the Moon is never adequately communicated to the reader. Indeed, whatever plot underlies the events in the narrative is so poorly outlined that I finished the book with no real idea of why Galvanix was such a pursued character in the first place. `Barons' comes across as a series of clumsily linked vignettes rather than a cohesive story. Things aren't helped by the author's tendency to use some of the more stilted dialogue I've encountered in a recent hard SF novel: Beryl answered these questions with alacrity. "Cognitive modification is negligible, since it cannot be accomplished without jeopardizing sophic integrity. If your memories and expertise were readily separable from your sense of self, they would have been decanted alone." A steady diet of such awkward phrasing tends to wear on the reader and makes `Barons' a too-hard slog. I can only recommend this novel to those readers determined to read every one of the Ace third series entries.
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