Customer Reviews

Phobos

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A space-opera whodunit suspense, complete with "no one is leaving this room until the guilty person here is exposed" scene. Good characters and story line. However, I stopped mentally listing the physics faux pas halfway through. And not nitpicky ones - blatant.

It's not the second law of thermodynamics that is responsible for recoil (it's Newton 2nd law); the zero-G antics are fun but often wrong (a chair with 20 kg mass is still MASS even on Phobos and if it hits you going 300kph or whatever it'll kill you); the shuttle impact on the surface as described must have taken place at 20mph or less or the hero would not have survived being slammed agains the suddenly-stopped cockpit wall; rockets don't fly in arcs (and don't do U-turns!) except near gravity wells, and then you have to match speeds to the orbital arc you want; leaping from a spinning surface in zero-G means the spin you had is imparted to your flight via conservation of rotational inertia. You couldn't jump straight down the axis of a longitudinally spinning ship without eventually hitting a wall due to radial velocity imparted from the floor UNLESS you jumped right on axis...

(Conservation of linear and rotational momentum are violated often... )

If you're falling in low G, touching a wall would impart outward force and send you away from the wall... jumping up to the ceiling in lowG doesn't mean you hit with a thump and stay there... unless you grab a handhold you'll bounce off with almost as much velocity as you hit...
You might say, who cares? We ignore Star Trek creating new "bands" of radiation at every turn... but all these things add up since so much of the storyline depends on these antics...if you're a hard sciences purist anyway.

But read it! It's gripping and fun, even with information withheld by the protagonist. The ending was suspenseful and not totally predictable. Had me going there.

I've always been picky that way... as an engineering physics major. I love Star Trek, Star Wars, everything, but you don't want to watch it with me because I nitpick every physics mistake!

A good read; I'll read the sequel. Overall, a high recommendation. As Mike Resnick said, "a very impressive first novel."

The biggest mystery in Phobos may not be the case Peace Corps lieutenant Mike Brogue is sent to solve, but the universe in which Phobos is set. Some of the backstory is filled in, but many questions remain unanswered (at least for now--the ending suggests a sequel).

The mystery itself is an engaging one, reminiscent of another debut novel, Matthew Delaney's Jinn. While that novel used writing gimmicks to create shocks (such as withholding necessary information), this one doesn't. If anything, the book reminded me of an episode of "Scooby-Doo" (and this is a compliment): before long it is clear that there *is* a rational explanation for everything that's happened; it's up to Brogue et al. to find it.

The book moves along at a fair clip, with enough suspense and intrigue to carry you through to the last pages. If Drago writes a sequel, I'll definitely read it.

I can't believe this book is not selling better. Somehow word of mouth is just not getting out. This is a great story. It's fun, exciting, and everything you want in an SF novel. The mystery part keeps it moving, the characters are fully developed and interesting. Do yourself a favor and buy this book. It's a great read and I can't wait for whatever Ty Drago comes up with next.

There is bad blood between the earthlings and their Martian colonists so the promotion of the first Martian to a Peacekeeper officer job may be a token action, but one heck of a large token. However, Lieutenant Mike Brogue does not wish to be the Jackie Robinson of peacekeepers; he just wants to do his job and help change a broken system from within.

Mike resolved a potentially nasty situation when Freedom fighters held a mayor hostage with enough dynamite to place the city at risk if an assault occurred. Following that success, Mike travels to the Martian moon Phobos where the Agraria Research Station is under attack by a serial killer somehow residing beneath the surface dust. Mike takes command of hostile earth born Peacekeeper soldiers who resent a Martian in charge. He makes inquiries and learns that the station has made incredible leaps in nanotechnology including developing a deadly artificial life form that someone controls as a killing machine. However, Mike is not any closer to determining who would use murder to drive everyone off the moon or why?

PHOBOS is a great police procedural science fiction tale that that hooks the audience from the moment Mike works the mayoral abduction case until he completes the dangerous moon probe. The story line works for both genres as Mars and Phobos feel genuinely colonized and in dispute with the mother planet while the investigation seeks to uncover the villain behind the homicides. The key cast members whether they are from earth or Mars are fully devolved so that the audience receives a great tale reminiscent of Sean Connery's Outland.

Harriet Klausner

It's clear that Ty Drago is a sci-fi fan otherwise he would have not made such blatant references to Star Trek (Final Frontier), Bradbury, and of course Issac Asimov which he made into a major character (which some changes of course)! To top it off he steals a major plot point from the book MARS which I found a bit disapointing but I understand the homage.
Of course the science is appaulingly bad. I love how mass can increase gravity! Mass of course can't. Mass can only affect the force as a function of weight not gravity (which is a universal constant). It's F = mg not m=mg. There are a ton of other sci flaws but this is a first novel and we can forgive. The plot is a mystery involving the everyman hero whom manages to be quite impressive in his crass ability to get to the root of the problem. The mystery is quite effective to keep you turning pages and its obvious that the author made a great deal of effort to get the mystery to work in the storyline. However as the mystery unraveled it was hard to keep a straight face. The evil foes have appaulingly silly lines like my favorite being "Why won't you die??" I laughed so hard I had to stop reading for a few minutes. There were others that were just plain ridiculous and I felt like I was watching a really bad tv murder mystery. In addition our hero manages to break bones, rupture hands, and get enourmous amounts of trauma induced into his body and still LIVE! We've been watching too much ER lately! However for 3/4 of the book I was hooked. It was fun and inviting and definately worth checking out. Beam me up Scotty!

I am a fan of the "hard science" science fiction and was raised on Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke. I am now a Greg Bear fan and I bought this book because Amazon.com reccomended it. The one bad thing I can say about it is that I got very little sleep until I was able to finish it. This book is a great scifi "mystery" which to me is the best kind. I really wasn't sure who did it until the end. Of course I also liked the political spin and the science. For a first effort this was great. Keep them coming

PHOBOS is an excellent read for the regular reader of SF as well as those like me, who are new to it. Interesting, believable characters, a plot that takes you for a tense ride, and careful attention to the fascinating details of this unique setting kept me engaged. I didn't want to put it down. Way to go, Mr. Drago!

There are two things wives should not buy their husbands, clothes and books. My wife broke this rule and picked up PHOBOS for me while at the bookstore...I have decided it's only clothes that are off-limits for her now! This book was a very fun and mature read in the classic SF tradition, I consumed it in one setting and was sad to see it end.

I hope there are more to come from this author, he's on my "must read" list for life.

Being female, maybe my point of view is different. I am not a scientist even though I love Sci-fi. This book was not touting a lot of difficult to understand technical concepts like a lot of the Hard Sci-fi. When I read I want to be entertained and not have to think for hours trying to figure out what the author means when he is explaining how things work instead of telling me a story. We should be able to use our imagination to just believe it does work and go from there on to the story. This book kept my interest. It had a great lead character who even though he is a hot-head, uses his brain as well as his brawn. This reminds me of the sci-fi books I read when I was a child 40 years ago. It was a great story and I hope that this author continues to write about this character. I can't wait to see what his next mission is and how he will solve it. Thank you.

I found this book very difficult to put down once I started reading. The plot did have a few inconsistencies, but the rapid pace of the story drove one right past those without a pause. I look forward to reading more of Ty Drago's books in the future.

Really, a very enjoyable, escapist read!