Review: Splintered Suns

Splintered Suns by Michael Cobley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I struggled with this a bit, and did finish it in the end, but can't go much better than "ok". The characters are all caricatures of themselves: Pirate Captain, Sneak Thief, Steely Woman Merc, Psycho - they have no depth, and don't feel at all like real people. It's like watching an old Black Adder episode: the situation may be amusing, but you don't believe any of the people are real. The plot is convoluted - involving alternate dimensions, virtual realities, and time travel - and full of Trekkian technobabble explanations, but none of it really seems to matter to the story. Which seems to boil down to:

Bunch of humans do some largely irrelevant stuff.
Drone character introduced in a flashback touches a magic crystal ("offscreen", even from the flashback) and is loaded into a virtual world.
Copy of drone in virtual world does everything of significance from this point forward - including saving the world from Evil Menace - occasionally popping back to explain things to the hapless biologicals in the midst of their irrelevant adventures.

The irrelevant adventures _were_ amusing at times, when you could disentangle them from the convoluted twists of time and dimension. So I didn't hate the book, but I didn't care about it much either.

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