Mercury Blade, James David Victor

Rating: 3 Stars

Publisher: Fairfield Publishing

Genre: Sci-Fi

Length: 168 Pages

Reviewer: John

Purchase At: amazon.com

Synopsis:

On the run with a stolen alien artifact that could ultimately destroy humanity. Chased by the most powerful military force in the galaxy and the most notorious criminal overlord in the sector. No problem for the fastest ship in the known universe.

A far-future space opera series from #1 Bestselling author James David Victor

Eliard Martin is captain of the Mercury Blade, the fastest ship in the galaxy. With his small crew, he travels the stars looking for adventure and profit. When he tries to pull one over on a dangerous criminal overlord, he soon finds himself on a mission that will lead to more danger than he has ever faced before. With the help of a mysterious stranger, who is clearly more than she appears, they will fight to stay one step ahead of the most powerful forces in the galaxy. Can the crew of the Mercury Blade fly their way to freedom or will they be crushed by the opposing forces seeking their demise?

Mercury Blade is the first book in the exciting Valyien Far Future Space Opera series. If you like fast paced space adventure, the rogue crew of the Mercury Blade will keep you entertained for hours.

Review:

As you may have been able to guess from the rating, this book, the first of the Valyien Far Future Space Opera series, didn’t really grab my interest. I could best describe it as a passable read.

The tale is set in the thirty-first millennium (no reference is provided to align with current Earth time) and concerns the exploits of a renegade spaceship captain, Eliard Martin, and the crew of the Mercury Blade, a sleek, super fast, Marcionne built starship, being pitted against despotic regimes in a race to obtain an extinct race’s advanced tech. I found the plot overall to be a bit Star Wars/Han Solo/Millennium Falcon’ish, quite a common theme in sci-fi.

The world building is okay, whilst the character development is so-so. To be frank, I really didn’t get that invested with the characters. The author could have spent more time rounding them out, permitting the reader to become more invested. The potential, to flesh the characters out, was there, but, the author failed to do so.

The book editing was reasonable, with one glaring exception, on page three, the plural of millennium is millennia, not millenniums. I would also like to mention that on the same page, when describing colours, the author wrote blues become pregnant purples. I thought, what!, did the author just have a brain fart? Don’t they realise that generally the readers of action based sci-fi are not the type of people who are inclined towards wanting to read flowery prose? Fortunately, it was the only time that it occurred within the work.

When it’s all said and done, would I buy Alpha Rises, the next book in the series? Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t.

If I was pushed for an answer, I probably wouldn’t. At AUS $3.99 for only two hundred odd Kindle pages, if they are of the same overall quality as this read, then, for me, it would be a bit too pricey.