A couple weeks ago Penguin Books sent me a hard back copy of Impulse: Lightship Chronicles, Book One; it arrived in the mailbox with no note so I guess I must have won a giveaway but who knows. I took it with me on a flight to San Antonio, read it, moderately enjoyed it, packed it back to take home. A week later I could not remember anything about the story other than it was OK but had a lot of holes. I had to open it back up to recall anything about the plot or characters.
Once recalled I did remember the book, which is an amazing medley of good and awful. On the good side the back story is intriguing and author Dave Bara could do a lot of stories set there. We have the successors to two sides in an interstellar civil war who are now on the same side, cooperating and looking for more planets to bring back into the fold, the Earth Historians who are Yoda-like characters except with their own infighting and factions, the Sri, who combine Dark Lord of the Sith qualities with scientific brilliance, the remnants of the old Corporate Empire and allusions to mysterious Forerunners. Right there we have the nucleus for many fine story telling opportunities.
The plot moves pretty fast with protagonist Peter serving on Impulse, a joint operation from Quantar (Peter’s home) and Carinthia to understand the attack on the ship Impulse and to seek other groups that survived the war. Peter does all sorts of heroic deeds and gains a nifty Forerunner artifact (of unknown capability) plus ends up engaged to the princess of a different planet. All in a days work for our hero!
The main problems with the book are the contradictions and ridiculous actions. For example:
Peter is on his first assignment after the military college, yet is promoted to lieutenant commander and is the third senior officer on the ship. True, he is the son of the soon-to-be planetary director but I had a hard time believing that any amount of nepotism would propel someone this high, especially when serving under a captain from Carinthia.
The Impulse captain and executive officer both leave the ship on shuttles to recreate an attack that nearly wiped out a different ship. They left fully expecting to be attacked, and left Peter in charge. Even to this non military expert that seems like dereliction of duty. Surely there is another way to diagnose an attack than by recreating it with crewed shuttles, and no captain and first officer simultaneously would jaunt off leaving college boy in charge. To top it off, Peter then delegates command to the non naval Historian, someone definitely not in the chain of command; that’s illegal.
Then when they are attacked Peter has to rescue them from a “hydrazine fire”. My memories from chemistry class are dim, but hydrazine is a nifty rocket fuel that would burn mighty hot and mighty quick.
Right after Peter joins the Impulse the crew pressures him to wear the Carinthian uniform, not the Unified Space nor Quantar uniform. He refuses, then the captain suddenly acts like it was all a big joke, hazing. It didn’t read like a joke and I don’t think it added anything to the story. Even my zero military knowledge says that’s not good manners or smart practice. Nor does it make any sense that a navy lieutenant commander would outrank a marine colonel. These are small errors that shake the reader out of book trance.
There is another scene where the executive officer is setting explosive charges but doesn’t know how and is unwilling to have Peter (who is expert) do it. Hmm. Again, this doesn’t seem like good military practice; certainly in the corporate world we expect senior management to delegate to the person best able to do a task.
The biggest sour note was the relationship and dialogue with Levant, a third planet ruled by a prince. During a social reception the prince first twists Peter’s arm to marry his sister, then demands full access to the Unified Quantar/Carinthia/Earth technology – and gets both. The prince has the repulsive habit of demanding something, hearing he can have it in 10 days and demanding it in 5. (I used to hate this behavior. It is disrespectful and in practice yields really bad results since everyone will sandbag whatever they say.) Peter and the rest don’t seem to mind and give in to every demand and speed up.
The book has several goofy scientific problems, such as a geosynchronous orbit only 300 miles up, but overall I can ignore science errors when the story moves along and the characters are interesting. With Impulse we have the outline of a good story universe, potentially interesting characters and problems, but we don’t have a finished novel. Impulse is Dave Bara’s first novel and I hope and expect he will improve his craftsmanship – and if writing science fiction or stories with military landscapes that he learns the basics.
Overall I’d give this 2 or 3 stars. I won’t look for book 2 in the series, Starbound: Volume Two of the Lightship Chronicles, which is out. The fact I couldn’t recall anything about Impulse a week after reading says it all.
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