Quote from: Kradan on Nov 13, 2022, 11:26:10 AMIt seems like there has been more misses than hits with Titan, eh ?
It's par for the course for license fiction. The authors doing these novels are often just "churn fiction" writers where they crank out a few novels a year based on an existing license.
I think so far, the only book from Titan I actually
liked was The Cold Forge. There are a few that are
okay. Everything from there is just a slow slide down to a flooded basement where stuff like River of Pain, Colony War, and the Isolation novelization bob around in fetid, murky water.
This novel was... not good. I listened to it while I worked because I got a promo copy of it as an audiobook. It just starts on a shaky premise (for example, Vasquez having two kids she had to give up kinda makes her complete indifference to Newt pretty weird), and the military parts scream of an author completely unfamiliar with the military, and the science fiction parts by an author not really familiar with science in general. Honestly, she doesn't even seem familiar with the Aliens franchise, but I'll be fair in that the license is so muddled with contradictory depictions.
Might have been an
almost interesting story about another Hispanic family in some generic military of the near future. But as an origin story for Vasquez the Colonial Marine from the film Aliens... not very much. If you can even call it that, since Jeanette Vasquez is only in about a third of the story. Vasquez is such a great character. I'd loved to have gotten a more thoughtful, series-faithful story about her background, about the rigors/challenges of being a Colonial Marine, about her friendship with Drake. Instead, this is just very dry, very slow, and mostly meanders about the lives of her two (adult) children. Even for a setting with cryosleep, slower space travel, and the potential of time dilation, it doesn't feel very well thought out.
I dunno. 1/5 for a fan of the Aliens franchise. Maybe a 2/5 if you just like near-future sci-fi.