Fulminata reviewed Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon
Review of 'Fire with Fire' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
As a novel this has four big strikes against it: it's got a mary sue as the main character, the speculative part of the speculative fiction is bad, the author never really sells one of the central premises of the story, and some of the bad guys are bad for no good reason. Despite all of that, it's not bad as light reading, but it's not good either.
Point 1: the main character is a mary sue. He is good at everything he sets his mind to, is never wrong, and all the women love him (I'm serious, even a woman that is introduced in a secondary role briefly has a 'if only I were younger' moment when appraising our hero). His only flaws are imposed on him from outside (he has a memory gap, and that's about the only thing that causes him to make anything resembling a mistake). …
As a novel this has four big strikes against it: it's got a mary sue as the main character, the speculative part of the speculative fiction is bad, the author never really sells one of the central premises of the story, and some of the bad guys are bad for no good reason. Despite all of that, it's not bad as light reading, but it's not good either.
Point 1: the main character is a mary sue. He is good at everything he sets his mind to, is never wrong, and all the women love him (I'm serious, even a woman that is introduced in a secondary role briefly has a 'if only I were younger' moment when appraising our hero). His only flaws are imposed on him from outside (he has a memory gap, and that's about the only thing that causes him to make anything resembling a mistake).
Point 2: There is a character that is put on “ice” in 2066, wakes up in 2119, and is utterly surprised by self-driving cars and voice recognition software. This book was published in 2013. Alexa came out in 2014, but there was already solid progress on voice recognition in the mid-aughts. I have a friend who was working on voice recognition software in 2006. It wouldn’t have taken too much research in 2012 to realize that there would be solid voice recognition technology well before 2066.
Self driving cars are almost certainly going to be a thing in the real universe before 2066 as well, and that was also pretty clear back in 2012, but I’m willing to cut a little more slack here as it’s before Google and Tesla got involved and really started publicizing the technology. Still, if you’re going to write science-fiction then you should probably spend some time researching the science. I'm reasonably sure a google search back in 2012 would have turned up plenty of evidence that self-driving cars will pre-date 2066, and won't require a dedicated road system!
Point 3: A lot of the story hinges around the need to keep certain things secret, and the author never really presents a compelling case for keeping them secret. At the end of the book the characters all go "yeah, it sucks, but we understand why the secrets had to be kept," whereas I felt that keeping the secrets was still totally unnecessary, and that it would have been far better to more widely disseminate the information involved.
Point 4: I'm progressive, and I still found the portrayal of the evil corporation in the novel to be a bit over the top. Corporations do evil things, but not just for the sake of doing evil things.
It's still not bad adventure fiction set in the future, but I can't really recommend it.
