Minor Thoughts from me to you

Temporary Duty by Ric Locke

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: I Shouldn’t Have Bothered

This is another book that I picked up because of a recommendation by Glenn Reynolds and his readers. Most of the recommendations I get that way are good. This book was the exception that proved the rule. Reading the reviews on Amazon, I wonder if I was reading the same book as everyone else.

The story revolves around two enlisted sailors: Todd and Peters. They are assigned to “temporary duty”, as advance crew for a Navy detachment that will be touring the local solar systems as the guest of a space faring alien race. The appeal of the story is that it takes place entirely from the perspective of people who are fairly low on the totem pole.

It’s a good premise. What went wrong? The first problem is that the book is long. If it were a printed book instead of an eBook, it would be well over 500 pages. I stopped reading 54% of the way through the book and not much had happened in those 200-300 pages.

Todd and Peters spent a lot of time on the spaceship learning the language, interacting with the crew, cleaning, talking, exploring, escorting other sailors, eating, sleeping. I was getting quite bored. More than half way into the book and I couldn’t identify an antagonist or a central challenge or any kind of real conflict.

Second, the characters all felt stereotypical and fairly homogeneous. The enlisted were decent. The officers and NCOs were mostly jerks who should have spent more time listening to Todd and Peters. The trader aliens were friendly but clueless about anything related in any way to technology. The technological aliens were standoff-ish but got friendlier when they saw that the humans knew how to perform routine maintenance and were eager to learn about the workings of the ship. And so on. Each character fit neatly into a mold and didn’t deviate too far from the outlines of that mold.

Finally, the Kindle edition had problems. Italics would often start in one word or phrase and then continue across multiple pages. I could fiddle with the book and eventually get the text to rest to non-italics but it kept happening. If the story had been more interesting, I might have persevered. But the combination of a dull story and technical glitches was more than I was willing to put up with.

Overall, I felt like this book could have desperately used an editor and a copy editor. The concept wasn’t bad but it pleaded and begged for someone to shorten it and tighten it up. It also screamed for some proof reading of the Kindle edition to make sure that everything looked good. It’s true that the brave new world of self-publishing doesn’t require the services of a publisher. On the other hand, some of those services are still valuable and worth paying for.