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A review by snazel
A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson
Ia can see the future. That would be useful (and possibly lucrative) gift-- if her talent wasn't so strong that it showed her several centuries into the future. And if the galaxy wasn't going to be totally and agonizingly wiped out three centuries from now. (Kinda hard to focus on building anything if you can see it eaten every time your concentration drifts.) The only way to save the Galaxy is to follow a convoluted and unlikely time-stream, nudging, dragging, shoving, and outright modifying the future into the way she wants it to go. And the first step is to enlist in the space marines.
Oh man, this book makes heavy with the info dumps. It opens with pages of actual "I-am-required-to-tell-you-this-disclaimer" legalese as she enlists, and continues through training, briefings, and a few KNOWLEDGE SMACKDOWN arguments. That combined with a character who literally does not make mistakes makes a book I usually would have dropped in annoyed boredom almost immediately. But I didn't. I enjoyed this. I want to read more.
Maybe my meds are a bit off and I'm not properly processing emotion? That's always a possibility. More than that though, I think, I enjoyed the actual premise. Of course the character doesn't make mistakes-- she cannot. She has to walk an incredibly fine line, hauling the future as she goes, preparing mentally by running through her probable timelines in every spare second. I mean, come on. She has to do everything from writing a letter to be posted two centuries from now to give instructions to make sure two people never meet, to demurring on singing for the company just enough that when they press her for a performance she has to PERFORM and tell the story in rhyme and thereby make her nickname stick. That's just a fantastic premise.
Or maybe I have a hidden weakness for infodump. Idk.
Oh man, this book makes heavy with the info dumps. It opens with pages of actual "I-am-required-to-tell-you-this-disclaimer" legalese as she enlists, and continues through training, briefings, and a few KNOWLEDGE SMACKDOWN arguments. That combined with a character who literally does not make mistakes makes a book I usually would have dropped in annoyed boredom almost immediately. But I didn't. I enjoyed this. I want to read more.
Maybe my meds are a bit off and I'm not properly processing emotion? That's always a possibility. More than that though, I think, I enjoyed the actual premise. Of course the character doesn't make mistakes-- she cannot. She has to walk an incredibly fine line, hauling the future as she goes, preparing mentally by running through her probable timelines in every spare second. I mean, come on. She has to do everything from writing a letter to be posted two centuries from now to give instructions to make sure two people never meet, to demurring on singing for the company just enough that when they press her for a performance she has to PERFORM and tell the story in rhyme and thereby make her nickname stick. That's just a fantastic premise.
Or maybe I have a hidden weakness for infodump. Idk.