Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

Does anyone want to discuss this story with me and maybe put my head straight on this. I just finished the novel and have not yet given it a score. I'm wavering between Hated It and Great, nothing in between.

It is an epic science-fiction space opera(4271Kb) over something like 103 chapters. In it a Vietnam vet meets a non-human race, the Tandra, who conveniently have a hidden base on his lands. Apparently humans are descended from a Tandra-ape mating many thousands of years before. Together they wake up the base hidden on the moon and then expand to the rest of the galaxy and beyond taking on all-comers

You have to admire the author who can devise a plot and myriad sub-plots to keep the story going for so long. I often felt it would have been better presented as a series of stories rather than one big one. Towards the end the sub-plots started to become exaggerations of sub-plots previously developed. Everything became bigger, better, more terrible, more horrific, more, more, more.

I did not like the disguised pedophilia, the race, the Tandra, appeared like children and in their society, sex between children and between children and adults was common. There again I'm not sure if I would have read it had it been tagged as pedophilia.

I also did not like the impression that I got that the author and editors had not read the final chapters with the many typo errors, most of which I was able to understand.

The final "didn't like" was about the amount of self-development that the MC experienced which by the about two-thirds of the way through seemed to be more that a human, even this mind-expanded, super-human could achieve in a lifetime, let alone the few years that it appeared to take.

I did like the space opera feel to it and I had no problem suspending belief and allowing travel at large multiples of the speed of light. (If you are going to break physics then really break it).

I did like the drama of the early battles for survival and of conquest. Likewise the pseudo-scientific explanations of the computers and AI resident in them.

I guess I just want to chat about the book to make up my mind whether, as a whole work, I liked it or not.

Does anyone want to discuss this story with me and maybe put my head straight on this. I just finished the novel and have not yet given it a score. I'm wavering between Hated It and Great, nothing in between.

I have not read Tandra, but I had started reading his Shawn. I can't remember anything about it, but looking into the folder I store every chapter I read, I've stopped reading with chapter 2. I hadn't outright deleted the read chapters and due to my CRS can't remember why I stopped reading, but reading your post about Tandra I'm quite certain I'll not restart reading Shawn.

To make a suggestion about scoring Tandra, score it twice! To circumvent SOL's changing of your score to the new value, login with another user name and score Tandra again.

HM.

Consider writing a review. What you have said here is certainly a beginning.

It has its good points, especially the grand sweep and the adventure, and its bad points. I do think it's entertaining, but when I reread it (which I've done twice) I have skimmed a number of sections.