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A review by tacomandandysavage
Andromeda's Choice by William C. Dietz
2.0
I've read bad books before. This is the first bad book that legitimately tricked me into reading it.
"Andromeda's Choice" is the sequel to "Andromeda's Fall," a military sci-fi novel about an heiress, Cat Carletto, who survives a violent political coup by changing her identity to Andromeda McKee and joining the future version of the French Foreign Legion.
This novel opens with McKee receiving a military commendation that sends her to Earth. The ceremony both threatens to reveal her identity and lends her an opportunity to get revenge and aid the democratic resistance by assassinating the current Empress. It's a great premise. It's a premise filled with high drama, emotional tension and political intrigue. It's the premise that was printed on the book jacket to sell the story.
Unfortunately, that premise goes nowhere and is entirely abandoned by page 115. Because William C. Dietz doesn't think that noise is interesting. What he finds interesting are 242 pages of an engineering mission to drill a hole in a mountain.
Really, Dietz seems most fascinated by the everyday banality faced by our men and women in uniform. Just one example sees McKee go to speak to a commanding officer only to find that he's not in his bunk. So she goes to the mess hall for lunch, then goes back to the CO's bunk to find that he's returned. That takes up roughly a page. The combined number of times Dietz describes the quality and length of McKee's sleep could take up its own chapter.
Perfect opportunities for dramatic tension fall flat on their face. Twice, McKee is forced to murder people in cold blood to protect her identity. The narrative pays some lip service to the moral dilemma presented by this, but ultimately both incidents get ethical and intellectual consideration comparable to "burgers or tacos?" There are 10+ villains in the book, and the overwhelming majority of them are killed off with all the ceremony and drama of a wet fart. The story barely keeps up the thread of McKee's part in the first-act assassination attempt with a Legionnaire planted to spy on, then kill McKee. If that were entirely cut out, the book would have lost maybe five pages, and nothing, respectively.
Similarly, the last two-thirds of the book deal with a Legion campaign to slaughter the indigenous population of their base planet for... reasons? Are there natural resources to be had? Is the planet's location strategic for interplanetary travel? I don't know! At any rate, McKee expresses moments of vague distaste for her part in the mission, then proceeds to slaughter the absolute shit out of all those aliens.
The book certainly has its share of battle sequences. Some of them are kind of cool! Most of them caused my conscious brain to black out from complete lack of interest. They would have been really neat to look at in a popcorn flick, or fun to play in a game (An iOS "Legion of the Damned" game is advertised on the last page of the paperback and gets a shoutout in the acknowledgements, no shit). They were boring as hell in text, mostly because they were divorced from anything that personally affected the main character's story.
This book gets two stars only because of the first act, and because Dietz still exercises certain strengths of his as a writer. He world-builds pretty seamlessly and he writes soft political drama pretty well (even though he clearly doesn't care to). But this entry in his Andromeda trilogy gave me little motivation to finish the series.
"Andromeda's Choice" is the sequel to "Andromeda's Fall," a military sci-fi novel about an heiress, Cat Carletto, who survives a violent political coup by changing her identity to Andromeda McKee and joining the future version of the French Foreign Legion.
This novel opens with McKee receiving a military commendation that sends her to Earth. The ceremony both threatens to reveal her identity and lends her an opportunity to get revenge and aid the democratic resistance by assassinating the current Empress. It's a great premise. It's a premise filled with high drama, emotional tension and political intrigue. It's the premise that was printed on the book jacket to sell the story.
Unfortunately, that premise goes nowhere and is entirely abandoned by page 115. Because William C. Dietz doesn't think that noise is interesting. What he finds interesting are 242 pages of an engineering mission to drill a hole in a mountain.
Really, Dietz seems most fascinated by the everyday banality faced by our men and women in uniform. Just one example sees McKee go to speak to a commanding officer only to find that he's not in his bunk. So she goes to the mess hall for lunch, then goes back to the CO's bunk to find that he's returned. That takes up roughly a page. The combined number of times Dietz describes the quality and length of McKee's sleep could take up its own chapter.
Perfect opportunities for dramatic tension fall flat on their face. Twice, McKee is forced to murder people in cold blood to protect her identity. The narrative pays some lip service to the moral dilemma presented by this, but ultimately both incidents get ethical and intellectual consideration comparable to "burgers or tacos?" There are 10+ villains in the book, and the overwhelming majority of them are killed off with all the ceremony and drama of a wet fart. The story barely keeps up the thread of McKee's part in the first-act assassination attempt with a Legionnaire planted to spy on, then kill McKee. If that were entirely cut out, the book would have lost maybe five pages, and nothing, respectively.
Similarly, the last two-thirds of the book deal with a Legion campaign to slaughter the indigenous population of their base planet for... reasons? Are there natural resources to be had? Is the planet's location strategic for interplanetary travel? I don't know! At any rate, McKee expresses moments of vague distaste for her part in the mission, then proceeds to slaughter the absolute shit out of all those aliens.
The book certainly has its share of battle sequences. Some of them are kind of cool! Most of them caused my conscious brain to black out from complete lack of interest. They would have been really neat to look at in a popcorn flick, or fun to play in a game (An iOS "Legion of the Damned" game is advertised on the last page of the paperback and gets a shoutout in the acknowledgements, no shit). They were boring as hell in text, mostly because they were divorced from anything that personally affected the main character's story.
This book gets two stars only because of the first act, and because Dietz still exercises certain strengths of his as a writer. He world-builds pretty seamlessly and he writes soft political drama pretty well (even though he clearly doesn't care to). But this entry in his Andromeda trilogy gave me little motivation to finish the series.