I read this series a loooong time ago, but since I have become a published author myself in the interim, I have come to realize the value of reviews, so I am making a point to go back and leave reviews for some of the books I read that have stuck with me over the...
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I read this series a loooong time ago, but since I have become a published author myself in the interim, I have come to realize the value of reviews, so I am making a point to go back and leave reviews for some of the books I read that have stuck with me over the years.
And Lord, this series is one of them. I have read and re-read this trilogy so many times I've lost count. And every time, I get to the end of the third book and curse a bit that Stirling never revisited the Nantucket-verse later on. I REALLY want to see what happens next!
But back to the first novel.
In some ways, I like this one the best, even though it had some problems. I find the adjustments that the Nantucketers have to make fascinating and fun to read over and over. For those who have criticized that the cast of experts on the island strained credulity, I would point out a couple things:
1)It would have been damned boring to read about them summarily starving to death
and
2)It's revealed much later in the Dies the Fire series that SPOILER WARNING
none of this was random, it was all very intentional.
END SPOILER
There are a couple things that bothered me about the first novel and the series. They've been mentioned before, but they did irritate me then and still when re-reading it.
First, there was really no need to make Captain Alston a lesbian or even a woman. In fact, she would have been far more believable as a man. I don't care how skilled she was, there was no way she could have done what she did hand-to-hand against men who fought constantly as the Bronze-Agers did.
Second, as has been said, Mr. Stirling is far too enamored with Eastern martial arts. I am a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and I have also trained for a year in Krav Maga and cross trained for a while in BJJ, two different styles of karate and judo. I've sparred with people trained in judo, BJJ, ju jitsu, kung fu and karate. While training in Krav Maga, my main trainer was a professional MMA fighter. I also boxed and wrestled in high school. And I can tell you that the style of fighting you follow is oh-so-much-less-important than the skill you've obtained and how much speed you've developed. Speed kills. Whatever you're going to do, if you do it faster than the guy you're fighting, you will most likely win.
Which is why the Nantucketers beating guys mano-a-mano who've been fighting armed and unarmed their whole lives since they were boys is utterly ridiculous. Particularly Walker, who has only been studying martial arts for 6-7 years max, going in and beating a Bronze-Age warrior to death with his bare hands. Nope, don't buy that. The fighting is also unrealistic in just the plain physics of it.
That said, MOST hand to hand fighting in science fiction in particular is unrealistic, so I didn't find it too hard to overlook this and enjoy the novel, and the novel was very enjoyable. I particularly liked that NO ONE among the Nantucketers really wanted to be in charge. That was very realistic, although it would have been better had there been one person who DID want to be in charge who was totally unsuited to it.
All things considered, the ISOT series and this book in particular are among my favorite fiction books ever, despite a few flaws.
One last thing. I have since bought the audible versions of all three books, and while they are in general very good and easy to listen to, a couple things bug me. First, the different voices are not well done by the narrator. His attempts at an "Asian American" accent are terrible, as is his attempt to represent Marion Alston's South Carolina accent. And second, his mispronunciations of common words is grating. He pronounces "corpsman" as corpse-man rather than cor-man, for instance. He also doesn't seem to understand how to use inflection to represent an italicized word. I think they definitely could have done better.
