★★ (2.3 of 5)

• Full Title: Velocity Weapon
• Author: Megan E. O’Keefe
• Year: 2019
• Pages: 505
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Orbit (Hachette)
• ISBN 978-0-316-41959-8 (trade paperback)

 

Summary

Gunship pilot Sanda Greeve awakens on a strange ship — the last thing she remembers was being sealed into an evac pod as her previous ship exploded around her. Now she finds herself on an empty enemy ship commanded by a sentient artificial intelligence who calls himself Bero; Bero informs her that 230 years have passed and the system is now uninhabited.

While Sanda tries to piece together what happened and what to do now, the story also jumps back to the year of the attack, following Sanda’s brother Biran back on Keep Station. He’s a newly minted Keeper — a group of humans who protect the secret of the Casimir Gates, the only way to cross interstellar distances in any reasonable amount of time.

Intrigue abounds, in both Bero and Keep Station, and the reader is kept guessing until the end.

 

Praise

There is much to recommend this book. The opening premise, for example, is gripping — what shall this woman do, finding herself alone in an unfamiliar starship and alone in the star system without access to the gates?

The characters are well-developed with realistic emotions and unpredictability, some more likable than others and each with understandable motivations. Maybe more than anything else, I enjoyed the wide range of characteristics, almost as if all people aren’t the same and don’t fall into a handful of types. Places and people are concretely described, without going on at length about them. The world-building is interesting — the future human society that O’Keefe describes is believable enough and well-detailed.

A multitude of twists — some less expected than others — fill the book. The biggest one comes halfway through (I won’t spoil it here), and was entirely unexpected — at least I didn’t see any signaling of it. A few of the others were more predictable, but still kept in doubt until they happened.

Physically, the book was well-made. The cover is atttractive; the font perfectly functional and undistracting; chapters are short enough to encourage reading just one more before ending a session. Despite being over 500 pages in trade paperback, it’s light enough that I didn’t notice hefting it while reading.

Despite all this, though, all is not well with Velocity Weapon.

 

Points Off For...

The first complaint I came up with was the time jumps — telling part of the story in the now and part of it 230 years earlier (alternating chapters); this bugged me for the entire first half — until the Big Surprise Twist convinced me that part was okay. (Still, I feel the frustration of that first half.)

But then it seemed that the second half of the book was written by a different person, or at a different time, or under different circumstances. Details began to mismatch, bits that made little sense given other parts of the story. Like when Sanda Greeve is surprised to learn something (no spoiler here) that had already been made clear to her several chapters earlier. Yes, I wondered whether I’d misunderstood the first part, but it kept happening. For example, the story says only Icarion ships have stealth mode, but then later the Prime ships have it too. In several places, it’s made clear that Bero is the largest ship Biran has ever seen, but then when Sanda and a friend — both of whom have been on Bero — visit the ship Biran has been on, they’re surprised at how large it is, especially the hangar bay, which astounds them. Which is it? Is Bero the largest ship, or is it the Taso? Another example: cameras are everywhere, recording everything — when it’s convenient to the plot — but at other times people can just slink around without being noticed.

There were also science/reality related mistakes, mostly in the second half. For example, while on a spacewalk, Sanda can just see her home planet, as well as stations orbiting it, and can also see other planets’ details in the star system. Yes, I can see Venus from Earth, but it’s just a pixel of light. I can sometimes see Jupiter too, and Mars, but certainly can’t see their moons or make out any details with the naked eye. Or when ships are “standing still” in space, right after being in a high-speed chase.

In places (again, mostly in the second half), it appeared as if sentences had been interjected without noticing where they’d been added. For example:

“In the meantime, he had a sister to welcome home. The weight of the shuttle key in his pocket dragged his spirits down. And to say goodbye to.”

—page 426

In that three-sentence example, clearly the second sentence was added later. The third one, really just a fragment, only makes sense if it comes immediately after the first sentence. Now it doesn’t make sense at all.

At the very end came my biggest disappointment: the story simply cut off without resolving anything. Five hundred pages of excitement, multiple story threads catching my interest, a web of intrigue keeping me tuned-in until the end... And then nothing. Nothing was resolved. The big mystery haunting the background isn’t even revealed, much less grappled with. Each character is left in a cliffhanger situation.

A much less serious complaint is that I was distracted by Britishisms: “grey”, “sod off”, “lift” (instead of elevator), and using plural verbs for singular subjects (“The Protectorate have been warned...”). The author is, as far as her limited bio indicates, American. Weirdly, armor and color were spelled in American English.

 

Conclusion

Up until about the three-fifths mark, I thought I might have a four-star book on my hands. But the growing number of mistakes, combined with the incredibly disappointing non-ending were thoroughly disappointing.

 

 

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