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jameseckman's review
3.0
I found out yesterday that Pournelle passed away, so I decided to reread one of his books as a memorial.
This one is one of his juveniles, which are clones of the Heinlein novels of many years past, and they include many of their flaws as well as virtues. The first major flaw is that space is relentlessly white, the two characters with French and Spanish names are villains with almost all the other characters having WASPy sorts of names. This book came out 10 years after Star Trek, so it's inexcusable, no Asian engineers, etc? My schools and companies I worked for had a fair amount of diversity even then.
The female love interest/protagonist comments to the male lead that he was one of those men that though women couldn't be engineers, the author has no other female engineers or scientists in the book, reinforcing the point. In the 70s and 80s the troglodytes often said this and it popped up at Google a while back. Hard to say how much of this was the future the author created or personal opinion, this book doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
Heinlein liked preaching politics in his books, Pournelle has the same bad habit, preaching extremely conservative/libertarian politics, but he's not as subtle and the sides are far more black and white. These issues occur in many of Pournelle's earlier works.
There are a couple of plot holes in this novel that are doozies, critical flight systems with no backups or redundancies and in a packed spacecraft where the two main characters could only be alone in the septic tank, a murder occurs and the body spaced without any witnesses.
What's good? It's still a cracking good YA adventure novel in the style of the Golden Age showing its wrinkles. My twenty-year-old self was happy the first time I read it.
A more enjoyable Pournelle read would be one of the books he coauthored with Niven like [b:Lucifer's Hammer|218467|Lucifer's Hammer|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388268115l/218467._SY75_.jpg|1842237] or [b:Oath of Fealty|583441|Oath of Fealty|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1229994838l/583441._SY75_.jpg|910180], one of the most successful partnerships in SF, they were better together. His military SF is good as well if you like the old school variety.
This one is one of his juveniles, which are clones of the Heinlein novels of many years past, and they include many of their flaws as well as virtues. The first major flaw is that space is relentlessly white, the two characters with French and Spanish names are villains with almost all the other characters having WASPy sorts of names. This book came out 10 years after Star Trek, so it's inexcusable, no Asian engineers, etc? My schools and companies I worked for had a fair amount of diversity even then.
The female love interest/protagonist comments to the male lead that he was one of those men that though women couldn't be engineers, the author has no other female engineers or scientists in the book, reinforcing the point. In the 70s and 80s the troglodytes often said this and it popped up at Google a while back. Hard to say how much of this was the future the author created or personal opinion, this book doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
Heinlein liked preaching politics in his books, Pournelle has the same bad habit, preaching extremely conservative/libertarian politics, but he's not as subtle and the sides are far more black and white. These issues occur in many of Pournelle's earlier works.
There are a couple of plot holes in this novel that are doozies, critical flight systems with no backups or redundancies and in a packed spacecraft where the two main characters could only be alone in the septic tank, a murder occurs and the body spaced without any witnesses.
What's good? It's still a cracking good YA adventure novel in the style of the Golden Age showing its wrinkles. My twenty-year-old self was happy the first time I read it.
A more enjoyable Pournelle read would be one of the books he coauthored with Niven like [b:Lucifer's Hammer|218467|Lucifer's Hammer|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388268115l/218467._SY75_.jpg|1842237] or [b:Oath of Fealty|583441|Oath of Fealty|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1229994838l/583441._SY75_.jpg|910180], one of the most successful partnerships in SF, they were better together. His military SF is good as well if you like the old school variety.
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