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A review by nooralshanti
The Man From Empire by Dan Melson
2.0
The Man From Empire is a sci fi tale about a man from another world who goes to Earth in pursuit of terrorists who destroyed a huge city/building complex in his world. Most of the story is told from the POV of the human he meets, and takes along on his adventures. And the story had a lot of potential, the world was clearly planned out in detail by the author, it's just that the big moments of the story didn't really ring through because the majority of the book was spent on info-dumps about this Empire that actually has little to do with the story.
It would be like a Doctor Who series where there was only one real story/plot for the entire series and the majority of the run-time was instead spent with the Doctor telling his companion all the minute details about his world's politics and coming up with analogies to try to explain powers that humans can't possible fathom anyway. These monologues stretched on and on and on, and honestly, they are the reason this got a 2-star from me and not a 3. And it's a shame, because it seemed like if the world had been revealed in a non-lectury way it may have been very interesting.
The characters also weren't very easy to care about. The alien character was too aloof and way too powerful for there to be any stakes when he got into tough situations, no matter how much he insisted that he was only low-powered among his people, and the human character... seriously stretched my immersion. I spent the first few paragraphs, as the character walked through and looked down upon, the neighborhood next to their workplace, convinced that it was a slightly prejudiced middle aged man then suddenly was shocked by the reveal that it was a woman and then eventually was told that it was a Mexican-American woman! There were all kinds of little details that were well-thought out that were supposed to make this character clearly a Mexican woman, but I still didn't buy it. And maybe it's me, here, because it's not like I know much about being a Mexican woman, but... it just seemed forced or not genuine somehow.
Also, the way the character thought about her own attractiveness, age, curves, etc, constantly even in the middle of battles, really grated on my nerves. At times I felt like she only really existed so she could be observed being good-looking and ask the other character very broad questions so he could continue his monologues, which is a weird position to put your main character in! A waste of a potentially interesting main character.
This brings up my final point which was another big source of annoyance for me. In between the lectures about the Empire and the "healing" enhancements that the main character got there was a very obvious sense that humans in this Empire had somehow reached "perfect" lives through tampering with their genes and that somehow genes could determine perfection or lack thereof. To be fair, the author did mention that the Empire had had some sort of negative experience with a Eugenics-type "breeding" and that it wasn't necessarily a good thing, but this was overshadowed by pages and pages of lecture about how much superior to Earth the Empire was!
Overall, it had potential and was certainly similar to a lot of the "golden age" sci fi books that many people do love, with a super-clever male protagonist who goes on and on about some scientific thing or another. I don't love those stories(the one book of Asimov's Foundation series I did manage to read bored me to tears), but I know others do, so you might like this one. And at least this one attempted to include a main female character in it, unlike many of those old sci fi classics. So if you like those kinds of stories, definitely check it out.
It would be like a Doctor Who series where there was only one real story/plot for the entire series and the majority of the run-time was instead spent with the Doctor telling his companion all the minute details about his world's politics and coming up with analogies to try to explain powers that humans can't possible fathom anyway. These monologues stretched on and on and on, and honestly, they are the reason this got a 2-star from me and not a 3. And it's a shame, because it seemed like if the world had been revealed in a non-lectury way it may have been very interesting.
The characters also weren't very easy to care about. The alien character was too aloof and way too powerful for there to be any stakes when he got into tough situations, no matter how much he insisted that he was only low-powered among his people, and the human character... seriously stretched my immersion. I spent the first few paragraphs, as the character walked through and looked down upon, the neighborhood next to their workplace, convinced that it was a slightly prejudiced middle aged man then suddenly was shocked by the reveal that it was a woman and then eventually was told that it was a Mexican-American woman! There were all kinds of little details that were well-thought out that were supposed to make this character clearly a Mexican woman, but I still didn't buy it. And maybe it's me, here, because it's not like I know much about being a Mexican woman, but... it just seemed forced or not genuine somehow.
Also, the way the character thought about her own attractiveness, age, curves, etc, constantly even in the middle of battles, really grated on my nerves. At times I felt like she only really existed so she could be observed being good-looking and ask the other character very broad questions so he could continue his monologues, which is a weird position to put your main character in! A waste of a potentially interesting main character.
This brings up my final point which was another big source of annoyance for me. In between the lectures about the Empire and the "healing" enhancements that the main character got there was a very obvious sense that humans in this Empire had somehow reached "perfect" lives through tampering with their genes and that somehow genes could determine perfection or lack thereof. To be fair, the author did mention that the Empire had had some sort of negative experience with a Eugenics-type "breeding" and that it wasn't necessarily a good thing, but this was overshadowed by pages and pages of lecture about how much superior to Earth the Empire was!
Overall, it had potential and was certainly similar to a lot of the "golden age" sci fi books that many people do love, with a super-clever male protagonist who goes on and on about some scientific thing or another. I don't love those stories(the one book of Asimov's Foundation series I did manage to read bored me to tears), but I know others do, so you might like this one. And at least this one attempted to include a main female character in it, unlike many of those old sci fi classics. So if you like those kinds of stories, definitely check it out.