Thursday, March 31, 2011

mpStation_4 Non-Review

Let me say right off the bat that this is going to be a non-review. I couldn't finish mpStation_4 by Thadd Evans. Here's my impressions of what I did read and why I had to stop.

mpStation_4 is a science fiction novel by Thadd Evans that follows tracker Michael Brin as he investigates the murder of Jeffrey Wright on space station mpStation_4 in the Dysta planetary system. It appears that the victim owned a cloned woman, Deat, who belongs to a class of people specifically grown to be companions. Did Deat kill Jeffrey for his money, or is there something more sinister going on with the cloned companions produced by the Sartex corporation? That's the bare bones plot of mpStation_4. It sounded interesting enough. I'm all for police thrillers with a sci-fi setting. However the execution failed to do the premise justice.

The writing made it impossible for me to immerse myself in the story. Almost every single description in mpStation_4 is created by an apposition which killed any semblance of sentence flow. Even the first sentence is guilty of this: "It was the morning of March 1, 4011 on mpStation-4, a city, an interstellar hub inside a dome, close to M-05, a moon’s equator" (1). New characters are described in this manner any time they are introduced: "Jensen, my Supervisor, a man with gray hair, had told me face-to-face not to send any email messages [...]" (1). However the worst example I could find is when the narrator is describing a woman he just met: "To my right, beyond miners, a hunched over old woman, an overweight female with brown skin, a stranger in a baggy spacesuit began walking toward me" (33). If she's an old woman she's already a female. It's redundant to mention her gender twice. Sadly that example isn't the only time this happens.

The whole forty pages that I was able to read were filled with poor description, grammatical errors, and info dumps. The novel comes with a glossary in the back for technical terms, but it's sorely lacking. I couldn't keep my photonic languages straight from my PINs from my LRIs. It was almost comical how many different acronyms there were included in the book.

There were a couple more instances where things just didn't make sense. If Brin was just transferred to mpStation_4 like he says in the miniature prologue, then why would he say this: "I am an experienced homicide tracker who works for the mpStation-4 Police Department, Division-1307." I mean maybe he's saying who he works for now after his transfer, but the way it was written confused me from the start.

Brin was always interacting with his tablet somehow. Floating screens seemed to appear from nowhere complete with floating text. He'd either wave his hands or touch through them and then magically things would happen. Or there would be vague descriptions of him typing some keys and magically text messages, emails, or even video emails would magically be sent to a variety of recipients. I could never picture exactly how these scenes were playing out, and it made the featured bits of technology come across like a deus ex machina.

Because of the poorly structured sentences, strange pacing, and huge infodumps I wasn't able to finish mpStation_4. It didn't help that I was only on chapter eight out of ninety-eight. As I skimmed through the ending of the book, I noticed that several of the chapters were only a page long. One of them was only three paragraphs long. I like when chapters aren't all the same length, but for a 249 page novel to have almost a hundred chapters? That comes across like a little much.

I can't say that I'd recommend mpStation_4. I'm not even sure how to pronounce the title, which to me is just another example of the confusing acronyms and technospeak that weigh the novel down. While it may have an interesting premise--a science fiction murder mystery thriller--the book is in too dire need of a good edit to justify reading it all.

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