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Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Background Consistency

This is Steven Petrick posting.

First, I am sorry that there was no post yesterday (31 March 08). I was ill Sunday (30 March 08) and wound up going home early yesterday as I was still drained from the experience (which I will NOT be going into any detail on, thank you very much).

I have been reading a new series called "the lost fleet". So far there are three books in the series. I will probably get the next book in the series because I have an interest in the "command problems" the main character is having, but for the most part find myself not impressed with the books, despite the high praise lavished on them by other authors. The reason I am not impressed in that I keep running into inconsistencies in the background, situations where, in my opinion, one plus one does not equal two.

To take the most egregious case, the hero's fleet has a ball and chain attached to it in the form of four auxiliary support ships. These four ships are vital to the fleet logistics (I have no problem with that concept), but are slower and not as maneuverable as the rest of the ships of the fleet. The problem comes in that sometimes the author needs them to be slower and less maneuverable to create a plot circumstance that the hero must solve, and other times they are apparently as fast and as maneuverable as any ship in his fleet, i.e., the author seems to forget that these ships are slower and less maneuverable.

They cannot be both, they must be one or the other. The fact that at times the author ignores this background point seriously detracts from the story he is telling (in MY opinion, you are invited to form your own).

As I have said, I will probably pick up the next book in the series, but the author's writing skill and ability to be consistent are not that high in terms of the overall background.