Homeworld

I'm almost certain that the word "grimaced" is used more frequently than the principle character's name. I'm not even joking. When they're not grimacing everywhere, they're scowling, glowering and snorting. Every conversation with a snort is defused when the more powerful participant chuckles. It's like a nursery book of simple emotions, left on the pile of magazines at a doctor's office and with most of the pages missing.

It's so full of this language, I'm tempted to download an epub if I can find one free, simply so I can run a few scripts against it. grep -c "(grimac(e|ed|ing)|scow(l|led|ling))", you know. Oh yes, and I find it disconcerting when two people are talking and one refers to the other as his erstwhile friend. Did I miss some falling-out? Does that word's meaning change over the next couple of hundred years? Who dares to dream?

The story (for all that happens, it's mostly maneuvering) is OK. It's not good. I don't care about any of the characters, even the ones who had more development in earlier books. The first couple of chapters gave me hope that this time there was a more interesting plot and that the book had maybe seen better attention from an editor.

It's not boring, exactly. If you skip over all the duplication, anyway. Because every time someone says something or some new information appears, another character will find a way to paraphrase it immediately, just so we're sure we understand.

I remember how in the first book the crew of this futuristic spaceship were getting used to using a touch interface, since this is clearly an alternate universe where iPods never happened. It's the same universe however, where people take mind-controlled space fighters for granted. That kind of disconnect is still here.

I've read the first one and listened to the next one on audiobook. I'm not sure why. I didn't finish this one and won't be getting any more sequels. I hope Currie keeps writing and other people get some enjoyment from it, because the world could do with more epic military SF and I don't want the genre to die out. But I mostly hope that we get some better authors.

Oh, and it's got a prologue. I have no idea why. It's chaptered and the prologue is just chapter 1 of the B-storyline. Now that's just weird.