The Spark by Susan Jane Bigelow
Sep. 21st, 2013 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA year after Sky Captain helped the extrahumans escape to Valen, everything goes to hell again. More than a decade later, the story picks up with Dee Burns White as a revolution against the Reformist government foments.
This is the third in the “Extrahumans” trilogy (available from Candlemark & Gleam), which starts with Broken. This book is better than Fly Into Fire, in that Dee makes for a better protagonist with a more interesting story than Sky did; but Broken was a really clever and well-done piece and this is just a semi-generic sequel. It needed to be tightened up, to have some of the conversational parts compressed and the action more streamlined. One event that promises to be exciting and nail-biting is rushed through in a third-person narration over barely two pages.
It was interesting to see the later years of this world, and it gave some hints to how the story “ended”, as it were, but it left a number of questions unanswered that irritated me, mostly about various characters’ powers and how they worked/what happened to them. In this universe, extrahuman powers seem to be ill-understood and come and go over time, but so little explanation is given that it feels like the power of plot necessity is turning them on and off.
[SPOILERS]
Among the questions that bug me: What was the deal with Dee’s “luck song”? Why did Penny’s flight cut out for years, then finally return on Valen? (I had guessed there was either someone that neutralized fliers or early versions of the anti-power serum, given the way a character in the first book died, but it was never revisited.) Even if Penny’s reproductive system could regenerate from the sterilization treatments, how did Sky Ranger’s? Did ConFedMilPol ever build another Torres, and if not, why not? What the hell was up with those mammoths—did Dee also have an undocumented animal ken power?
And finally: Was I the only one who thought of White Wolf’s Aberrant and Trinity roleplaying systems, where the superhumans are all driven off into space, and then return after centuries of mutation and inbreeding as overpowered monstrosities? Because that particular threat always seemed to be lurking, given the people who fled Earth and never looked back early on.
Overall: The first book, Broken, is genuinely brilliant. This is just a sequel, and it could have used more tightening up, but it’s still a decent read.
This is the third in the “Extrahumans” trilogy (available from Candlemark & Gleam), which starts with Broken. This book is better than Fly Into Fire, in that Dee makes for a better protagonist with a more interesting story than Sky did; but Broken was a really clever and well-done piece and this is just a semi-generic sequel. It needed to be tightened up, to have some of the conversational parts compressed and the action more streamlined. One event that promises to be exciting and nail-biting is rushed through in a third-person narration over barely two pages.
It was interesting to see the later years of this world, and it gave some hints to how the story “ended”, as it were, but it left a number of questions unanswered that irritated me, mostly about various characters’ powers and how they worked/what happened to them. In this universe, extrahuman powers seem to be ill-understood and come and go over time, but so little explanation is given that it feels like the power of plot necessity is turning them on and off.
[SPOILERS]
Among the questions that bug me: What was the deal with Dee’s “luck song”? Why did Penny’s flight cut out for years, then finally return on Valen? (I had guessed there was either someone that neutralized fliers or early versions of the anti-power serum, given the way a character in the first book died, but it was never revisited.) Even if Penny’s reproductive system could regenerate from the sterilization treatments, how did Sky Ranger’s? Did ConFedMilPol ever build another Torres, and if not, why not? What the hell was up with those mammoths—did Dee also have an undocumented animal ken power?
And finally: Was I the only one who thought of White Wolf’s Aberrant and Trinity roleplaying systems, where the superhumans are all driven off into space, and then return after centuries of mutation and inbreeding as overpowered monstrosities? Because that particular threat always seemed to be lurking, given the people who fled Earth and never looked back early on.
Overall: The first book, Broken, is genuinely brilliant. This is just a sequel, and it could have used more tightening up, but it’s still a decent read.
