Beyond the Hallowed Sky

Book 1 of the Lightspeed Trilogy

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Meh. There are some interesting ideas in this (primarily about alien pro-genitors of life as we know it and faster-than-light travel) but the characters aren’t well developed, the author does a lot of landmarking of Scotland which is difficult to follow if the reader isn’t acquainted with it, and the story takes about a hundred pages before it begins to get interesting.

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Morag opened the lock and people pushed themselves or were pushed towards it and along the tube. In three minutes they were all out, and the airlock closed. The air that had come in from the moonlet’s pressure was fresher than that from Cloud City’s, but the evacuees had left behind a whiff of sweat, of puke and piss along with a lingering trace of Venusian atmospheric stink. Everyone took a deep breath anyway.

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We follow three storylines that end up meeting in the end, but the way the chapters are presented make it difficult to be engaged with the story. There is the ship-building in Scotland, the events on colonized Apis, and a robot’s adventures on and around Venus. In the midst of those storylines, we get acquainted with the geo-political set-up of 2070 and some of the political ideas that underpinned the people’s Cold Revolution which brought that set-up about.

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Walworth scratched a taut tendon in his neck behind his right ear. ‘Looks like this could be a martyrdom operation, I’m afraid. Sorry about that.’
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‘I’m ready for it,’ Owen said.
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‘Are you really?’ Walworth frowned. ‘Soldiers have loyalty, terrorists have fanaticism, but what do you have?’
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Owen nodded down at the paper. ‘Instructions.’

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There is a disconnect with the descriptive passages. Many of them are about things that don’t add value to the story while the weakly-drawn characters could have used more description. I didn't really care about anyone, I just continued to read to find out what happens in the end.

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Slightly ahead of the others, he climbed into his rig. He clipped on the limb and head attachments, strapped himself onto the saddle, spun around a couple of times on the gimballed pedestal while stretching and flexing his legs, arms and fingers. He checked feedback and servos, clamped on his padded earphones and flipped down the visor. Instantly he was down in the yard, animating his usual avatar, a blocky Nissan model coded AGR-1.

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My hope is that now that the characters, locations, and political situations are clear, the story can really take off in the second book.

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