I bought these books in Iowa in October (I read the first of the series, The Ghost Mine, last year). And I said of the first:
I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off.
I thought since I just finished a book about an actual video game (Brute Force: Betrayals), I thought it might be a good idea to read them to do a little internal compare-and-contrast.
So: Remember, the plot of The Ghost Mine is that a space miner named Justin Barclay takes a job at an ACM mine, and strange happenings are afoot. It’s supposed to be a creepy space mystery of sorts as he finds out what happened in the abandoned mine where an accident took the lives of many. He finds that exposure to the valuable reactive gas that the company is mining caused an accident and killed the miners, but that some space magic had embedded the personality of one of them in the mine’s computer systems which led to the final dungeon crawl wherein Justin escapes as his best friend sacrifices himself, but he, the best friend, gets the space magic and is embedded in the prosthetic arm that Justin earned during the course of the book’s events.
These two books are a single story spread over two books, and the thematic feel of them differ from the first kind of like–oh, gods, here I am saying it–Alien and Aliens. This one is a more straight ahead action/thriller kind of pacing without the mystery and horror, although there is some horror in it.
So: Justin and his tech ghost have taken a position on an asteroid-mining ship, but a problem on an unstable asteroid damages the ship, and they land on a ship carrying thousands of colonist and a complete colony-in-a-box for repairs. At the same time, a scientific vessel is pursued by an advanced warship owned by ACM corporation trying to capture a small parcel it’s carrying. Neither of the vessels is a fan of ACM, and they end up teaming up along with a band of escaped prisoners from the Avarice, the ACM ship, and they try to escape as ACM captures the ship. However, when they’re backed into a corner, the attractive scientist opens the case and releases the weapon–a collection of self-replicating nanobots which capture humans and turn them into sharp-bladed zombies. But ACM has a secret weapon of its own: a bio-engineered super-soldier.
So it’s then a series of set pieces and shifting missions to destroy the nanobots or to escape the ship or destroy the ship. It wasn’t bogged in the “mystery” as the first was. In the almost six hundred pages between the books, it has a number of subplots so that you never knew what might happen next. It also had a varied cast of characters, and they for the most part were really at risk (perhaps except for the main character). The characterization and writing lacked real depth, though. I mean, it’s no worse than men’s adventure fiction, but it’s not John D. MacDonald.
From my limited exposure, I’d also say that Wolf seems to be improving as a writer. I’ll not dodge his other books as I have other writers (such as, say, Cary Osborne, whose book Iroshi I read in 2018, and I’ve quite passed over the other two books of the trilogy in the years since). I do so hope that his imagination broadens so all of the plots are not torn from today’s video games. Although given one is Santa versus Zombies and another is a developer gets trapped in his own video game, perhaps not.
