“[A]s much fun as [being] surrounded by 12,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste.”
No, really. The author tries to make you believe that being surrounded by nuclear waste can be fun.
The story:
The Übermensch Hail wants to murder people, and that is a good thing, because it is in revege.
The rest is flat, utterly unrememberable characters, drone porn¹, literally a two pages description of somebody dying, repeated once, because it was so much fun the first time, and much, much more bad writing.
I can’t really make my mind up whether Hail is a Bond villain, a cult leader or an exploitive mine boss. He has something of all of those types.
I was asked for a review of this because i like some Heinlein novels. This has nothing of Heinlein, which is an interesting story, memorable characters, and, quite often, thought-provoking philosophical undertones. None of which you get here.
I don’t want to do editing for free, so i keep most of the details of the plain errors to myself. Publishers must pay their editors. When you self-publish, you still must self-pay the editors.
Only one hilarious example. One of the drone pilots is using one of these.
A control yolk. It’s spelled like that in the epub version. I’m very observant. (Apparently fixed in the PDF version.)
I’ll save you more details of the story, but here comments on the blurp, mostly written before i read the book
•“Marshall”
(I am using the text from the Goodreads beg. The image on the author’s web page uses “Marshal Hail”)
•“was a husband, a father,”
Yawn. So we know nothing up to now, but you’ve wasted some ink.
•“a Physics Nobel prizewinner”
It is “Nobel laureate in Physics” maybe “Physics Nobel laureate”, prizewinner is a brand of pumpkin. Apparently he got the prize for inventing the travelling wave reactor. Which is odd, because that was done in 1958 by Saveli Feinberg. Why some other guy would get a prize for it some 50 year later is not explained in the text.
•“and industrial billionaire.”
Oh sure. Like all the other physicists. That’s mostly because they all have so much time on there hands that they can found and run corporations. Because research doesn’t keep you busy at all.
I wonder what our great hero is, besides these things. Maybe astronaut, marathon runner, rock star, gourmet cook, and ninja-pirate‽²
•“But when Marshall's family was killed in a terrorist attack,”
Cheapest trick in the book. Stuff the hero’s family into a fridge.
•“he became a predator”
Yeah. Cheap literary trick.
•“and redirected his vast industrial assets toward one goal,”
He’s rich. Already mentioned that.
•“removing”
You mean murdering. Please don’t use euphemisms.
•“every person on the FBI's Top 10 Terrorist list.”
There is no such thing. The FBI’s public wanted notices include their “Ten Most Wanted” list, with robbers and murderers, and the “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, with, at the moment 29 people on it. Also, they want hints to arrest them. The whole due process of law thing. The people are very much wanted “Alive”, not “Dead or Alive”.³
•“With the help of his MIT colleagues,”
Citation needed. A lot of scientists don’t start building weapons just because they are asked to by a guy with a lot of money.
•“Hail designed and built a devastating arsenal of attack drones”
The first one will be described in excruciating detail. Later they fly around a lot, but often you don’t now if they are small aeroplanes, multicopters, classical helicopters, or other aircraft. One might be a balloon?
•“of all shapes and sizes”
This is a bad idiom, because it is not true. There was no quincunx of oblate spheroids (a shape) that was 500 m wide (a size).
•“that are flown by the nation's best young gamers.”
Oh dear. Gamers are murderers. I thought your guy had billions to spend. Why not hire veteran pilot mercenaries?
•“The world”
It is well known that the world is always of one opinion. 🙄
•“will come to realize that Marshall possesses the capability”
… to string together lots of buzzwords.
•“of getting to”
I.e., murdering
•“anyone, anywhere, at any time,”
But not without boring readers with long descriptions of the door locking mechanisms and interior decoration of the ship you use to travel there
•“unleashing an operation so disturbing that the CIA has named it”
If the CIA, who are murdering people with drones, are disturbed by what you are doing, it’s time to re-examine your life choices.
•“Operation Hail Storm”
And a name drop.
Up to about one third through i wanted to give this ★★☆☆☆, which for me means really badly done. Boring, badly edited and the like. I reserve ★☆☆☆☆ for works promote or condone negative things like these:
•“Joanna Weston was an attractive woman, but for those few seconds she looked
anything but attractive. Her face was warped with shock.”
Those few seconds was her seeing a man dying from cyanide poisoning.
Those two sentences show two things: Lack of empathy and rank misogyny, a “Smile girl!” when a woman does not delight in suffering.
•“‘Ding, Dong, Wang, Chung, Cheech and Chong, all their names are so confusing.’”
That’s the Bond Girl, who is said to have a knack for languages, complaining about “Asian” names.
On a lighter note, one more sleeping editor. I’ll leave this as an exercise to the author:
¹ Not people having sex set to drone music, but description of many small uncrewed aerial vehicles flying around, that read as if the author had one hand down his pants.
²Turns out, he is an unlicensed helicopter pilot. Sigh.
³Also, there are no North Koreans on the real list. That would be pointless. To get them to a US court, the wanted people have to already be in the US, or in a country where they could be arrested and extradited. This does not apply to DPRK government officials in their own country.
