Jitterbug

Our Gareth certainly likes his huge space fleets and engages them in battle at the end of both this and the “Embers of War” series! To start with however this is a much smaller scale story, focused on a small tramp freighter with a crew of five. There’s a good relationship between all the crew members, who are each nicely drawn with some good witty repartee. In many ways this part of the story is what I expected “A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” to be, but that book I haven’t been able to finish yet as it just hasn’t gelled the way that “Jitterbug” does.

We soon realise that we are also in the genre of the “Big Dumb Object”, the weird segments that have been constructed from the gas giants, but these are (incorrectly in hindsight) rather taken for granted. What begins as a small tale of bounty hunting expands to a political thriller and then a galaxy spanning conflict.

There’s a huge amount of exposition crammed into the last fifth of the book, including a complex alternate timeline that actually sounded more interesting than this one.

A good story, perhaps a bit unevenly paced but the characterisation is good. I must say however that I didn’t like the title or the fairly unimaginative and frankly, dull cover, and would not have bought this except for the author name recognition, but overall I’m glad that I did.