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Losers In Space (2012)

by John Barnes(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0670061565 (ISBN13: 9780670061563)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Viking Juvenile

review 1: Overall I enjoyed this book, but it still was rather slow in the beginning and I had a hard time getting to know the characters, possibly due to the manner that they were all thrown at you in one go. But it did pick up and then I had to finish it. I wish the end had been drawn out longer and the "epilogue" was fun but I still wish that there had been more about the other characters. But overall an interesting science fiction story that makes me think other sci-fi books I've read aren't really sci-fi...
review 2: Mild spoilers ahead.This is one of those books that I imagine sets Robert A. Heinlein rolling in his grave. It's got a solid SF juvenile story at its core: spoiled teens stow away on a spaceship, and when things inevitably go wrong, they have to rely on... more their skills and each other to survive. This is a plot that you should not be able to go wrong with.And Barnes goes so, so wrong with it. There's the condescending intro trying to explain hard SF to the unwashed masses. Then there are the "Notes for the Interested," which is Barnes' "solution" for the problem of big lumps of exposition in the aforementioned hard SF. Dude, Pratchett dealt with this kind of stuff in footnotes decades ago, and he did it with grace and humor. Clumsy exposition doesn't get any better when you put it in its own typeface.And then there's the big honking piece of idiot plot that blows the whole story out of space. Picture this: a spaceship undergoes a disaster in a media-drenched future society. Presumably every eyeball in the solar system is on this ship for quite a while afterwards ... and nobody notices when the ship stabilizes itself and starts making course corrections? Nobody then draws the obvious conclusion that there is a crew on the ship waiting to be rescued? Give me a break. We could figure that out today with a halfway decent telescope, never mind in The Future, and that means the several hundred pages of "we can't get the comms to work, oh no, how shall we be rescued" make no sense at all. The book's not a total loss, thanks to the characters and the descriptions of shipboard life. But goddamn it, if you're going to play with the hard SF net up -- and if you're arrogant enough to make a big deal about it in your introduction -- play the damn game right. less

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