Customer Reviews

The Third Craft

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I quite enjoyed this book; there were a number of original ideas and well thought out and elegant solutions (especially when dealing with alien technology) that were very well written with just the right mix of technical details, without getting bogged down in the details.

There was a surprising lack of female characters that once I noticed it, was a little distracting to the story; there was a least one relationship where I really wanted to see the woman's side of things. And yes, there is a huge coincidence that is a little difficult to accept, and could have been (and perhaps will be) explained fairly easily (at least in my humble opinion).

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and look forward to future installments in the story!

I read this based solely on the Amazon blurb which made it sound like a character-driven science fiction story set in the "real world", so I had some preconceptions before I started reading.

I will say the author has a succinct prose style and the narrative had a good pace and was easy to read. The author is also obviously knowledgeable about the scientific aspects of his story. After a promising start in which two brothers unearth a UFO, however, the plot line unraveled to such an extent that I felt I could have spent my time better elsewhere. The handling of the human/alien connection was clunky, to say the least, and hard to accept at face value, as there was no attempt to provide a psychological context for what would obviously be extremely challenging experiences for any human to undergo.

Unfortunately, the plot has a hole in it large enough to fly a UFO through with room to spare. The aliens are presented as a race advanced millennia beyond human evolution and culture, having overcome the ego-driven behaviors which have plagued human civilization; yet the characters who have direct interactions with the aliens find themselves locked in a very ego-driven battle for supremacy, in which specific individuals from the alien contingent behave like medieval warriors battling to conquer a kingdom. Which are they, benign advanced beings or glory-driven egomaniacs?

I also have to mention that there was not a single female character in the entire story, not even peripherally, which gave it a decidedly testosterone-driven nerdish quality. Um... yes, I have to point that out, since I am a female myself, and I missed having any around in this story to inject a little "je ne sais pas".

With some fleshing out of characters and a more balanced treatment of the interplay between them, this could have been developed into a good novel. Less dry, encyclopedic passages, less adolescent conquest dynamics, and there could be something worth reading here. If there are, in fact, succeeding entries in this trilogy, let's hope they bring some substantive explanations about the seemingly paradoxical motivations of the aliens, for starters. I believe this book is a vanity publication, which goes to prove there is something to be said for going through channels and having an editor go over your manuscript before publication. This writer has a nice style, but needs to leaven the story with something more heart-felt.