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A review by wunder
Alliance Rising: The Hinder Stars I by C.J. Cherryh, Jane S. Fancher
Did not finish book.
Hard pass after just one chapter. The approaching mysterious ship could not have been less suspenseful. Basically, we watched the characters staring at the arrivals board. And there was a bar fight that didn't happen for any useful reason and where we didn't care who won. And lots of infodump. I'm not a fan of the informational prologue, but that would have been a huge improvement here.
The final straw was basic editing lapses. Fallon was described as "time-dilated as hell" on two consecutive pages, oops. But the ridiculous thing was describing how the time-dilation on the sublight runs had affected him. Excuse me! The fundamental point of Einstein time-dilation is that the time experienced in the frame of reference moving close to c is completely indistinguishable from time elsewhere. The time is exactly the same. Writers have had well over a century to get used to that. Special relativity was worked out 37 years before C. J. Cherryh was born.
I'm OK with fantasy physics and some bad plotting, but one chapter was enough to make it clear that this book does not respect the time and attention the reader is offering. I've read plenty of C. J. Cherryh, but this may be the last one I read.
The final straw was basic editing lapses. Fallon was described as "time-dilated as hell" on two consecutive pages, oops. But the ridiculous thing was describing how the time-dilation on the sublight runs had affected him. Excuse me! The fundamental point of Einstein time-dilation is that the time experienced in the frame of reference moving close to c is completely indistinguishable from time elsewhere. The time is exactly the same. Writers have had well over a century to get used to that. Special relativity was worked out 37 years before C. J. Cherryh was born.
I'm OK with fantasy physics and some bad plotting, but one chapter was enough to make it clear that this book does not respect the time and attention the reader is offering. I've read plenty of C. J. Cherryh, but this may be the last one I read.