The Notebook
Overall Rating: 4/5
Spoilers: Minimal
TL;DR: Interestingly enough, could have worked better as a solo novel. Not sure how excited I am for sequels considering the scale of Deus ex Machina and "it just worked" involved. Also, several jolting stabs of wokeness.
***
I picked this up a while ago on a Smashwords promo. I think I knew then that it was the first in a series, but then I forgot. That almost makes the reading kind of sad, because it could have worked better as a solo novel. This is for several reasons, but I think they could all boil down to giving the reader too much time to think which, I predict, leads to devastating over-explanation.
This is a hardcore, mech-space-opera-style work. A soldier deserts her unit, steals an experimental spaceship, and embarks on a dangerous journey to find a mythical Lost Ship, a ship that has disappeared from realspace, gone to nullspace, and returned, often decades or centuries later. There's cryo and AI and mechsuits and spaceship battles and tech and gizmos and so on.
I'm not going to harp on the feasibility of the tech necessarily, but some things do bother me. I definitely appreciate that care is taken to keep track of MC's inventory. Tools and gadgets, number of grenades, amount of ammunition, the capability and capacity of the various pewpews, all of the details that really fill in the small cracks in a scene. But I am forced to wonder, based on the sheer size of the inventory overall, how big this suit is and how MC is pulling off some of the acrobatics. You can't have skin-tight and inventory capacity of a poorly-planned RPG. Even with biometric responses, there are some things that just don't make sense.
If this were a one-shot novel, I could also forgive the lack of explanation of how things are classified and what it means. In a single novel, I guess I don't really need to know what a fifth-level AI is, or a seventh-level or any of that. I don't need to understand all the protocols and the systems and everything else. I can take things at face value that one is better than the other, and a computer is a computer. And maybe this is developed more in the sequels. Absolutely possible, I'm fairly lenient on this point. And yet, knowing that this world is going to continue, some of the terms that are thrown around feel a little...uninspired. What is a fifth-level AI? What is a seventh-level AI? How do the systems on the ship work that it can self-sustain a crew for years? One-shot adventure, don't care, let's have fun. Longer adventure, I want to know.
The biggest gripe that I have is an apparent overall lack of awareness when it comes to mechanized weaponry. I'm not talking feasibility, just theory. The smaller your weapon, the more precise you have to be. If you want to kill someone with a ballpoint pen, you have to have astonishing aim and strength. The bigger the weapon, the less accurate you need to be. Precise with a bullet, less so with a bomb. Sad but true. This is generally taken into account when it comes to the MC's ship (although the reported size of the ship seems to get bigger the more the book goes on; from a two-seater pod-like thing to a relatively small vessel). It is a small ship, which has some advantages, but when it comes to battle against bigger ships, every shot has to count. Unfortunately, the bigger ships don't seem to be scaled accordingly. If your ship is the biggest, baddest, most top-of-the-line thing out there, nicknamed "Planet Cracker," what is the problem here? I mean, break out the space Flammenwerfer; you don't have to be accurate since you are apparently 100x bigger. Or, since they want to take her in (dead or alive seems to matter less and less as it goes on), why throw pebbles? There is a self-aware moment that their AI is predicting her AI. Break out the cannonball and destroy the rudder. Okay, fine, so they have a little trouble swatting the housefly, but I have a hard time understanding just what the problem is here.
I get the time crunch that MC is under, but I kind of wish more time had been given to the peculiarities of the Lost Ship. The impossibly long table is an oddly enticing opener, but that's about where it ends before MC switches to "there's something on the ship" and then focuses just on that. Otherwise, it's just another haunted house. No real opinion on the creatures, except that I wish more investigation could have been done. Again, time crunch, hostility, and maybe she just isn't into such analysis. I don't know.
There were several very out-of-place woke comments that really jarred me. It had nothing to do with anything in the story; it was intentional and direct to the reader, which was entirely uncalled for. At least two of the comments could have been reworded to be relevant and interesting to the story, but the author instead chose to stab the reader in the eye, and, as a result, one of MC's final choices was cheapened and deflated.
Overall, not bad. Not sure how I feel about sequels, but I'm not opposed to the idea.
***
TL;DR: Interestingly enough, could have worked better as a solo novel. Not sure how excited I am for sequels considering the scale of Deus ex Machina and "it just worked" involved. Also, several jolting stabs of wokeness.
