Pirate Latitudes

Generally I prefer giving smaller and lesser known authors a chance; the big names are doing just fine without my business. But occasionally - and maybe against my better judgment - I'll try my hand at one of those books that just has a giant picture of the author with no text as the entire back cover, as if that's endorsement enough to read it. For my first go-around with Crichton, this was not a great showing.

I thought I liked pirates going into this, but now I'm second guessing myself. Or maybe I just don't like adventure stories as a genre, where the focus is the action and it's just expected that the characters will be functionally the same people at the beginning and the end of the book. Development clearly was not the goal here, but it's also hard to stay engaged when your protagonist is almost comically infallible and capable of meeting every challenge without fear of failing. Nothing is ever resolved with a "yes, but..." sort of outcome, it's just a continuous run from one scene into the next for its own sake.

Also, things are played, well, maybe not historically accurate but at least credible for a good chunk of the book until there's a kraken encounter that cannot be explained away as anything other than a giant sea monster. Also, just a piss-poor utilization of most of the female characters in the book, who seem mostly to exist as either prizes to be fought over, sexual distractions for bad guys, or victims of rape. This read like something I thought was first published in the 1950's era of pulp paperbacks, not 2009.

This is not a book that could be written today. Not because it would generate too much controversy, but because audience desires have, thankfully, progressed to want something more substantial than what I got here.