Tag: Michael La Ronn

Honor’s Reserve by Michael La Ronn: A Book Review

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

I’m sorry. This just did not hold my attention.

More than a year ago, I read Phantom Planet, which is the second book in the Galaxy Mavericks series but came out before the first one. Near the end of that, Grayson, the main character in Honor’s Reserve, shows up to rescue Keltie (he’s in the space equivalent of the Coast Guard). At the time, the vibes I got were definitely eyebrow-raise-what-have-we-here-man-in-uniform-potential-romantic-interest-alert. So it’s disappointing to find that Grayson’s back story is, so far, more boring than Keltie’s.

I don’t have a problem with the fact that this space opera takes liberties with science. In fact, the author includes a hilarious disclaimer at the beginning announcing that he is planning to do just that. Some other Goodreads reviewers actually DNF’d this book because of perceived inaccuracies with hyperspace travel and the like. I would just like to remind my fellow science-fiction readers that hyperspace travel, no matter how convincingly it is “explained,” is FICTION. Travel that even approaches the speed of light probably physically destroys the object traveling. All hyperspace travel is fiction. So is evolution. And boy, is there some fictional evolution in Honor’s Reserve!

Scientists think that the nanocraft [carrying a selection of DNA from humans and various animals] collided with an asteroid that had some kind of molecular life on it, and that that asteroid crashed onto an Earthlike planet that supported carbon life. The two life forms mixed, rapidly evolved, and Arguses were born.

Honor’s Reserve, p. 36

Arguses are aliens that basically have human bodies and the heads of pigs. And this entire, intelligent species evolved in … how long? “Nine hundred and fifty years.” Actually less, if you count the transit time for the nanocraft. Wow, that really gives a new meaning to “rapidly evolved.” But frankly, if you look into molecular biology, an intelligent species evolving from bacteria at all is just as unlikely as it evolving in 950 years. So, why not? Remember, this is science FICTION.

I also don’t mind the things in this series that might be considered anachronisms. The year might be in the 3000s, but human nature remains the same. So, Grayson and his fellow crewmembers getting onto a private spacecraft and giving it a bureaucratic-style safety inspection seems refreshingly realistic. I’m sure bureaucracy is not going to decrease with the advance of technology. And, perhaps my favorite moment in the book is when the heroes are trying to jump into hyperspace to escape the villains, and the computer keeps asking them, “Are you sure you want to jump into hyperspace?” and making them click a bunch of permissions, causing them to get caught by the people chasing them.

So then, why did this book keep losing my interest and why did I nearly DNF it at about 40%? Maybe it’s something about the writing. Although I am willing to put up with unrealistically easy jumping into and out of hyperspace, I do like the logistics of my action scenes to be nice and clear, and in Honor’s Reserve, they often weren’t. For example, it was sometimes not clear to me that a character had put their helmet back on (or never taken it off) before, say, the airlock was depressurized. That seems kind of important. There’s a scene near the beginning where Grayson is holding on to the outside of a space ship (or the edge of the airlock door, which is open? Not sure?) where the logistics were just not clear. The scene moved too fast. Show, don’t tell is great, but sometimes with sci-fi we need a little telling, or the scene actually loses drama.

Speaking of losing drama, there was definitely some untapped potential for character development here. I am speaking of Rina, the female villain of the story. [spoilers ahead] She is found to be human trafficking: helping the odious Arguses to kidnap people so they can enslave them. Then we find out that she is doing this in exchange for a promise from the Arguses to protect her and her family. She was at first enslaved, and she has the burn marks to prove it. Well, even if it’s not ultimately excusable, this seems like a pretty understandable motivation. It might bear looking into a little further. Rina has evidently been through some pretty heavy trauma recently and is in a desperate situation. We might want to examine that, no?

No. Rina is consistently portrayed as a sociopath. “You can’t trust anything she says.” She even comes right out and says, “It didn’t really bother me to enslave a bunch of other people, as long as it wasn’t me.” So Rina is thoroughly bad and we can safely hate her and turn her over to the Arguses.

Even this character arc might have been OK if it had been written with a little more complexity: if, say, Grayson had been tempted to feel sorry for Rina when he heard her tragic back story, had tried to turn her, and had then been double-crossed and we find her doubling down on her evil. But that’s not how it goes down. It’s as if Rina is barely a character at all.

To sum up: a bland, one-dimensional villain (and consequently, hero); aliens that don’t seem spooky, just like grosser, evil-er people; and action scenes that sometimes felt rushed and inadequately explained are all the reasons that I found the author’s notes at the end, about his philosophy of space operas, much more interesting than the book itself, and the reasons I am sadly giving this book two stars.

I will say that Phantom Planet, while it had some of these same problems on a smaller scale, was better than Honor’s Reserve. It had some spooky, unexplained things that promised more terror later in the series. I might give this series one more book before I give up on it.

A Light, Crunchy Snack of a Space Opera

On By Jennifer Mugrage8 Comments

Keltie Sheffield is a real estate agent. In space. About two thousand years after humanity has learned to take to the stars. She sells planets like you would sell a house, but with a 200-year mortgage, paid off by the buyer’s great-grandchildren. She sells this one planet, which she thinks is uninhabited, but … you can imagine how that could possibly go wrong.

Also, she’s a young career gal who chose this path to spite her parents. Lost in space, she’s rescued by an adorable, gentlemanly military reservist named Grayson, and … you can imagine the possibilities.

At 162 pages, Phantom Planet is light, crisp, and refreshing, sort of like eating a handful of cucumber slices, maybe with a little tzatziki. Also like that, it goes quickly, and sort of feels like it was written quickly. I finished it in about one day. Also like the cucumber, it is really tasty (i.e. fun) and digestible, but it feels like just the appetizer. I got the feeling this book was the setup for a much larger epic. Which it is, as it is one in a planned series called “Galaxy Mavericks.” Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading so many bricks lately, but it felt like just a first chapter.

One more cucumber comparison: this book is very clean. There is plenty of budding chemistry between Keltie and Grayson, but spoiler alert: they don’t even manage to kiss. At least not in this book.

Fun Moments

There were a ton of fun and charming moments. I am pretty sure the author gave himself a cameo (as a bookseller, naturally), and I’m now wondering whether he does this in all his books. Also, the scientific disclaimer at the beginning is delightful: “OK, pretty much every area of science probably got bastardized in some way while I wrote this book. Any and all errors were made lovingly for your reading enjoyment.” Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that line!

The food and fashion in Phantom Planet still retain many influences from Earth circa 2020. Keltie enjoys wine and chocolate croissants, for example. The women wear jewelry, which women have always loved to do, but you seldom see it in most space settings. (And why don’t more space opera characters get drunk in space? That seems like such a human thing to do, but this is the first time I can remember encountering it.) And, despite thousands of years of technology advancing, human beings are pretty much the same: there are still phishing scams!

One more thing that it may surprise you to see someone do in space: pray. “Prayer was always important in space. It kept things in perspective for her. A lot of people forgot that and often got carried away” (page 39). And no, this is not just meditation: Keltie is “thanking God,” and she wears a cross necklace. This element is kept very low-key, but it is so refreshing to find in a genre that often assumes that people, in the course of discovering that distant galaxies and alien races exist, will have “discovered” that God doesn’t. Space travel (even in this series, where it’s comparatively easy) is so dangerous, full of wonders, and above all disorienting that we can imagine that prayer would be a very human response and an excellent way to keep one’s sanity. Yet it is missing from so many books in this genre which, consciously or not, wish to portray human nature as mutable.

But What Does She Look Like?

Besides the “this is just the first chapter,” slightly less-than-satisfying feel of this book, which I understand because it’s part of a series, one minor thing bothered me.

We are given physical descriptions of nearly all the major characters, including Grayson, Keltie’s boss, her flight crew, her clients, and her best friend. We are not given a physical description of Keltie. Being able to picture the characters is important to me, so I just imagined her looking like a women from the cover of another La Ronn book I had seen (which is in a completely different genre). About 3/4 of the way through, we are finally told that Keltie has very long hair. Then that her sister is “blonde-haired and skinny and unlike [Keltie] in every way” (p.134). So, Keltie apparently is stout or curvy, with long, dark hair. I still don’t know what color her eyes are.

Maybe this issue is not important to any reader but me. (Maybe it’s even a trend. Is there some rule that we are not supposed to describe the point-of-view character, so that readers can picture that character however they like? I’m asking because I recently read a different book that made this same omission.) As for me, I take cover art very seriously as a clue to how the characters look, and I dislike having to guess and/or revise my mental image of the character partway through. (Especially if you are going to introduce a romance as a subplot.) Please, fellow authors, when you first introduce a character, give us a quick physical sketch, even if it’s just one or two outstanding physical features that can act as a peg to build our mental image on. I’m not saying you have to do the scene where the character looks at herself in the mirror (though if she DOES happen to look in a mirror, and you don’t tell me anything about what she sees, I’m going to be miffed). Just throw me a bone here.

Now … Go Eat Some Cucumber!

Other than those minor quibbles, this was an enjoyable book. There were lots of questions left unanswered that make me want to get the next one. If you like space operas and are looking for a new series to gobble up, check out Michael La Ronn’s Galaxy Mavericks! This would be a good series for libraries to carry because readers will speed through the books and check them out one after the other.