Ghost Galaxy Omnibus (Ghost Squadron books 1-7 and Precious Galaxy books 1-4), Sarah Noffke and Michael Anderle. The sheer size of this collection works against it. It’s SF-lite, intended to be fun and frothy. Undercut by thinly-developed characters and deus-ex-machina plot mechanics. Switched from the Ghost Squadron to the Precious Galaxy series at the 4% mark, and didn’t find enough to make me want to go on. The first chapter or two of the first PG book was really solid and encouraging, but it lapsed quickly into the same bad habits as the first book.
Among those bad habits:
Physics:
Eddie squeezed the grip and pressed it forward, igniting his thrusters and moving ahead. He performed a double roll, then an aileron roll for good measure.
You did an aileron roll in space? In a vacuum? Okay, maybe with thrusters? Of course, he then goes on to blast an asteroid with bullets a sentence or two later. So maybe he did use his ailerons. Not everything can be The Three Body Problem, but...eh...
Emotions:
He took off running again, looking forward to seeing the person he’d been dreading all these years.
How does that work? My experience with emotions is limited, but I think you generally feel one (looking forward) or the other (dread) rather than both. Alternately, this could be read as a badly-written shot at expressing a nuanced and sophisticated inner conflict. That’s almost more disappointing.
Words:
Liesel gave them a commiserate expression.
“That’s what we have to find out,” Jack said decidedly.
And somewhere in here (location 20530) someone summated something to someone else.
These are real words--okay, the first two are--but they’re used badly and repeatedly: five “commiserate” as an adjective, and ten “summated.” (And that’s before getting to the overuse of smirk/smirked.)
Plot:
There’s a potentially fascinating and exciting sequence a chapter or two into the 8th book where our heroes investigate a shuttle, crewed by a weird robot, which subsequently explodes while they’re in/running away from it. It’s hard to tell because the descriptions are so thin, but it apparently doesn’t damage the ship its docked in--even though if I remembered this right, it’s one deck above a critical area.
After this, one of the heroes discloses finding an important clue while in the now-exploded shuttle, although again we didn’t actually get to explore this with them while it was happening. In response to this, his uncle (and the heroes’ effective boss) then drops some background information which ties the plot together and makes the whole explosion make marginally more sense. The challenge is that the info is the kind of thing which trained professionals (of which we have three in the scene, plus an AI) presumably would have talked before risking rapid unscheduled disassembly. It’s been been withheld because...reasons?
The plot elements which could have generated some tension and excitement are under-written, and the randomly dropped Important Facts made me wonder if I missed an earlier plot twist or if this had basically been bolted on to the dialog. I suspect the latter.
If this sounds cranky, it is. I sacrificed what could have been a useful extra hour of sleep the night before I wrote this wading through Ghost Galaxy trying to give it a second chance.
What made me give up was realizing that I felt like I was reading a giant first draft. There’s a ton of potential in the story and characters, but little or no reason to stick around through--checks Amazon--2,352 pages* of poor editing, awkward word choices, shallow characters and an apparently improvised plot. The accumulation of little annoyances wound up far outweighing the potential in the series
Smirk index: Overdone: 0 points (32 smirks, other annoying stuff.)
Immersion factor: Shallow: 1 point.
Writing quality and interest/innovation: Average-minus: 2 x 0.75 = 1.5 points.
Character/plot development: Average: 1 point.
Total: 3.5/10
* And dude, seriously? 2001: A Space Odyssey is just under 300 pages. Even the Dune trilogy, which I’d always thought was the standard for could-usefully-have-been-shorter SFF, is “only” 950-some pages. There’s some serious page count envy going on somewhere.