Customer Reviews

StarBridge 6: Ancestor's World (Crispin, A. C., King, T. Jackson, Starbridge 6.)

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I discovered the Starbridge series last summer and have loved every book in the series! A.C. Crispin brings interesting *female* characters to the science fiction genre, which I, as a teenage girl, am thankful for. Instead of focusing on the goings on at Starbridge with it's students, Ancestor's World focuses more on what is happening with Mahree as she investigates the murder of a member of an archeological team on the planet Na-Dina, a nice change from previous books.

I had read all of the Starbridge novels before this one, and was excited to find this one by accident in a local bookstore. However, when I actually read it I was disappointed. The Starbridge universe has always seemed to me to be creative and different, both in the various species that are found and the various ways that they interact. This book had too many rote characteristics of a novel written solely to sell. It felt like the author(s) decided, "People like reading about violence, so we have to include some fights... And they like reading about sex, so we'll throw in an affair [which worked out much too neatly, by the way; in a real relationship, Mahree's sexual fling with someone else would have had some negative affects. I know that some authors write about all sorts of unrealistic relationships, but I liked these particular characters enough to be annoyed by having someone mess with them like this] ... And let's throw in some generic traits that have been in the other Starbridge novels. Hmm; which shall we choose?...." instead of actually having a good, workable idea for a new story and a new people group. As I have mentioned, I greatly enjoyed the first several Starbridge novels, and I was also fond of the one after "Ancestor's World", so I'm guessing it was the co-author.

i started reading starbridge with the first novel. i read the first three and then lost track of the series until recently. this one is well worth the read.

Well, it's interesting to see the widely varying reactions of the two book reviewers to this novel that I co-wrote with Ann Crispin, at her kind invitation. For what it's worth, there is nothing "stock" about the plot, characters, crises and resolutions of Ancestor's World. Ann and I presented a 20 page outline to Ace Books, which was accepted with no complaints. Drawing on my background as a working field archeologist, I presented some "real" archeological issues for the enjoyment of readers, along with >two< romances, one for the younger crowd and one for the older reader. None of the story elements were picked in order to please some imagined recipe for selling the book. They all flow naturally from the Southwest USA desert environment and the basic story question of "What might dynastic Egyptian civilization have been like if it had survived until around 1915 AD?" Serious readers can find more info on this novel at my author's blog on Amazon.com, at Author Connect, under my T. Jackson King writing name, and also at my SFWA website of [...]. Tom.