Customer Reviews

Starliner

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

 

 

I loved this book from front to back! The way Drake describes in detail the workings of the Starliner and its crew is fantastic. Every world that is visited is a new treat. Drake goes so far as to detailing the color that street lights burn and the different way the local gunpowder behaves. Do yourself a favor and read this book!

This book always brings a smile to my face. It's the first Drake book I ever read, after hearing Dave criticize Kuttner for writing "Kill an alien, fu#* a blonde" stories, because that's essentially what this is. It's also a sort of first foray into space opera predating Drake's Lt. Leary series by many years. A good romp through a great hotel on jets!

If you have something else to read go ahead. The book has its good points but jumps from vignette to vignette without good flow. The hero is too moody, and his personality inconsistent.

I cannot recommend David Drake's STARLINER.

The book is basically a series of unconnected vignettes that occur on a large spaceship. There is little consistency of characters or plot; even important characters (for example, the star-crossed young lovers) simply vanish from the plotline without any resolution of their story.

The hero doesn't really make sense. He's a traditional hero insofar as he's from a rough and impoverished background, trying to gain advancement for himself, and apparently irresistible to women. Unfortunately he just isn't believable. The hero's background is so deadly and scary that the mere look in his eyes will cow gangs of brutal thugs... but his day job is basically as a chirpy cruise director for first-class passengers on a luxury cruise liner. I find it difficult to visualize a hero so terrifying that criminal gangs flinch and flee from his glance, but who loves his day job smiling and simpering convincingly at pampered rich people.

Many of the most exciting bits of the story occur off-screen. We see the hero's little corner of the action, but unfortunately the author has made our hero peripheral to most of the exciting events occurring in this fictional universe. We've got invasion fleets, secret agents sneaking weapons onto spaceships for hijacking attempts, planet-wide political coups, and gigantic spaceliners hitting planets with the force of nuclear explosions... but we only hear about that stuff from news reports, because the hero isn't there for any of it!

There's a subplot with the hero coming to terms with his father's legacy, but it's not well developed. There's also a subplot with the hero developing feelings for women beyond screw-em-and-forget-em... but the author keeps postponing that he runs out of time, and then tries to cram it into (literally) the last page of the book. As a result, the hero reads like a cardboard cut-out; he does whatever Drake needs him to do in any given scene, and has no depth or personality of his own.

Without a coherent plot, or an appealing and consistent protagonist, there just isn't enough in STARLINER to justify your time.

A man with a mysterious past joins the crew of the luxury starliner Empress of Earth just as two worlds on the starliner's route threaten war. Since the Empress could transport a whole lot of troops, it's a prime target for hijacking by both sides, which leads to more action and violence than one would usually see on a cruise. This allows a few enjoyable secondary characters to pop up. Oh, and the main character gets laid a lot. Yes, that is the sum total of the plot.

That said, I liked the storyline enough to finish reading it, though to do that I had to skip several of the sex scenes (like the one with the alien matriarch). This is a space-going version of a "men's adventure" story, where the men are men and the women are willing. You have been warned.

Would I reread it? No, but it was fun once.

Starliner was an entertaining book, and had it's better moments. At the same time, it was fairly basic science fiction. The adventure episodes are somewhat formulaic, and don't always make that much sense if you think about them for that long.

However, I did enjoy a couple of the running subplots, and their were some surprising but plausible twists regarding a number of recurring characters near the end.

Overall I'd say the story is imminently readable but not that inspired.

I rated it as fair when it actually was between fair and good. Ficton is fiction, especiallty about space travel with many different species of aliens. It takes a special person to write about this material and David Drake is not. I will not read another one of his books. Even though this is fiction we still want the characters to be somewhat believable. The main character is all the superheroes rolled into one. I did not find this book to be awful because the author did find creative imagination in a number of parts of the book. Overall, I was diappointed.

I am sad that an artist of such caliber would stoop to concealing a crotch novel in a space tale. This one even involved bestiality. Sad. I'll be sure to look twice at the next David Drake tale BEFORE I buy it.