Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsthin plot, good action, (very) generic characters.
Reviewed in the United States šŗšø on June 11, 2014
Frontier saga if it was made a movie, would have been great in the hands of Michael Bay or J.J Abrams. In fact if you've seen the latest Star Treks from J.J Abrams or any kind of light science fiction action movies, you've kind of seen a glimse of Frontier saga in literature prose.
The history is a classic space opera setting, a single military ship with inexperienced and dedicated crew leaded by the hotheaded and unconventional young captain who meet and resolve all the impossibly dangerous and difficult challenges threwed at them in a deus ex machina fasion.
The universe the story is set in isn't very original, Earth is arming itself as it's existence is threatened by some generic evil galactic federation. It's best hope is the Aurora , a ship equiped with the latest highend technology available. The ship and it's revolutionary equipment is tested in secrecy, but of course something goes wrong, and a ragtag of a crew have to find a way to return to earth while dealing with implacable and dangerous enemies on all sides in this fiendish universe.
While not revolutionary the plot is actually okay if you don't have expectations of the book to become the next "Dune", although a few characters might be a bit grey, the difference between the "good guys" and "bad guys" is pretty clean cut. And the good crew of the Aurora and their allies stand for the valours of democracy and freedom while their enemies are mostly Tyranic evil hordes, the book gives us surprisingly little information on them other than they're mix of fascists and mongolian hordes.
Honestly this is something I can forgive, especially since the space battles (and there are many of them) are really well written and rather well executed if predictable. Like others reviewers have pointed out, important plot actions that happens in the books are unlikely to the extreme even in the theatrical settings of of space opera.That our unlikely hero should just show up just in the right moment in the right spot in the universe to help some revolutionary in need as a result of a misjump is a bit much to swallow.
Again thanks to well executed action scenes it's not boring and the writer's world (or rather universe-) building skills make up for those blatant plotholes. It also makes up for the uncreadible luck and skill the heroic crew demonstrate however desperate the situation is against all odds.
What I can't really forgive are the generic characters and their predictable personalities. We already mentioned the young hotheaded and unconventional captain, his second of command who is basically his opposite in personality, she always do things by the book and follow the rules and throw tantrums once in a while reacting to the captains out of the box thinking. The Chief Ingenior is of course russian, an abrasive and friendly person, bit of comic relief and best friend of the captain. And the chief of security is a young and pretty woman whose dark ops training has made suspicious and a bit cynical. I could continue but you see the point, most of the characters are caricaturist to the extreme, you have seen them before in countless settings but probably not as generic. I have seen children cartoon show with characters with more depths than those.... The romance plots are incredibly predictable as well and generic as everything which has to do with the characters personalities, you can spot them right away and they're rather bland.
I really wished the characters had been more fleshed out and complex rather than the "usual good heroes" which work in an action movie cause all the action and explosions take your attention away from that fact, but those books doesn't give the reader that luxury. The frontier saga is still quite readible if you can stomach a predictable plot and generic characters with no depths. Personaly I don't regret buying or reading the 3 first episodes of the saga, it's well written and for all its fault , not boring, but I'll probably skip the rest of the serie. Maybe the author will mature in time, I'll keep an eye open for future and hopefully more fleshed out adventures.
