Dr. Robert Runte, an Aurora Award-winning Canadian SF critic and commentator and former editor, has written a glowing review of Lost in Translation for Issue 11 of Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, and was kind enough to send it along to me. Highlights:
Edward Willett has been publishing nonfiction and award-winning SF for young adults through various small presses for years, but Lost in Translation is his first mass market SF paperback release, so for most readers he will appear as a new author. And a very fine discovery he is!
. . . .Willett surprised me by writing a ‘first novel’ that was able to both tap into my nostalgia for the hard SF of my youth, and to provide a completely contemporary adult novel. The fast paced action kept me turning pages long after I should have been abed, and the anti-racist, anti-war message seemed particularly timely for the Bush administration’s War on Terror.
Willett has long deserved the mass market distribution he is finally receiving, and Lost in Translation is far better space opera than the right-wing militaristic offerings of established writers like David Weber and Steve White. Suddenly, its worth looking in the ‘W’s again!
Thanks, Robert!
Although I think I should mention that, though I’ve never read Steve White, I really love David Weber‘s “right-wing militaristic offerings,” at least the ones offered in the form of Honor Harrington novels.
1 comments
Okay, I have to admit I secretly read the Honor Harrington novels too — as confessed in an essay in Prairie Fire (Sept 94) entitled “Why I Read American SF”. But I would enjoy them a lot more if they were not such right-wing crap. Weber’s co-authored novels with White are also great fun, but White’s stand alone novels are unreadable for their sociologically unsound depiction of the future evolution of societies — embarrassingly bad projections of the author’s current paranoia into the future. Both authors suffer from a “might makes right” approach and a virulent anti-communism that was anachronistic in the 1960s let alone in 21st century and beyond….
If people want military SF, they should try Tayna Huff’s Valor’s Choice, which is a far more compelling.