Sunday, November 4, 2018

Ashes of Exploding Suns, Monuments to Dust, by Christopher McKitterick

[Analog]
★☆☆☆☆ Needs Improvement

(Far-Future SF) Original humans killed off all the people on Karalang 15,000 years ago, but the captain of Karalang’s last surviving warship just woke from cryosleep to get his revenge. But there’s an intruder on the ship. (17,401 words; Time: 58m)

Recommended By: πŸ‘STomaino+1 (Q&A)


"Ashes of Exploding Suns, Monuments to Dust," by (edited by Trevor Quachri), appeared in issue 11-12|18, published on by .

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Review: 2018.564 (A Word for Authors)

Pro: A society driven the “fidalguia” instead of honor (or reason) is an interesting concept, particularly since it seemed to have worked for them up until the disaster.

Con: The narration is intrusive, the dialogue is unnatural, and the story is larded with infodumps and bits of as-you-know-Bob dialogue.

The science is really, really bad. Worse, the story defies common sense. A whole star can’t sneak up on another one. If the people on Earth had 15,000 years to see it coming, they’d have done something about it much sooner.

In fact, given how slow the star was moving (about 0.7 light-years per century), if the Earth people didn’t want it to come close to them in the first place, they had thousands of years to argue the point with the Karalang people. Just abruptly showing up and killing everyone made no sense whatsoever.

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