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alexxkayFor want of a better genre descriptor, I'd call this Space Opera. In a setting which has 15 inhabited worlds and FTL, three young friends embark on ambitious careers in service of the Queen. One seeks to enter the diplomatic service, and the others want Letters of Marque, to fight the Queen's enemies in privateer spaceships. And by the way, all three of them are skilled con artists, albeit extremely patriotic ones. Hijinks ensue, both wacky and serious. There are great successes, tragic failures, and lessons on the different kinds of heroism.
This is actually the closest thing I've ever read to a "typical John M. Ford novel", which is odd, since most of his books are so different from each other. But it has pretty much all of the qualities that I associate with Ford, both positive and negative. It's short, in a way that almost seems dated in these days of doorstop novels; back in 1982, you could tell a sprawling, epic story, and still fit it inside 200 pages. Ford assumes that his reader is particularly clever; world-building is kept in the background, for the player to pick up by inference and context; none of the characters explain themselves to each other, so motivations must be deduced from actions. On the one hand, it's nice to be so respected, and cool when you pick up a detail without excessive prompting; on the other hand, sometimes the characters actually *are* more clever than I am, and I can't figure out why they're doing what they're doing. And it has Ford's typical love of mixing details from multiple historical eras. I especially liked the use of a "diplomatic language" that Ford rendered as iambic pentameter :-)
Recommended to fans of SF adventure who are willing to invest some extra mental effort.
This is actually the closest thing I've ever read to a "typical John M. Ford novel", which is odd, since most of his books are so different from each other. But it has pretty much all of the qualities that I associate with Ford, both positive and negative. It's short, in a way that almost seems dated in these days of doorstop novels; back in 1982, you could tell a sprawling, epic story, and still fit it inside 200 pages. Ford assumes that his reader is particularly clever; world-building is kept in the background, for the player to pick up by inference and context; none of the characters explain themselves to each other, so motivations must be deduced from actions. On the one hand, it's nice to be so respected, and cool when you pick up a detail without excessive prompting; on the other hand, sometimes the characters actually *are* more clever than I am, and I can't figure out why they're doing what they're doing. And it has Ford's typical love of mixing details from multiple historical eras. I especially liked the use of a "diplomatic language" that Ford rendered as iambic pentameter :-)
Recommended to fans of SF adventure who are willing to invest some extra mental effort.