Outbanker

by Timothy A. Madden

extremely rare,very good condition

Genres: Science Fiction

314 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1990

Reviews

[Wastrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book while sorting through paperbacks. Apparently it is a somewhat rare item. I must have read part of it years ago. I did not remember any of it after the first couple of chapters.

This is a peculiar book. It has some good action sequences but is greatly bogged down by the inner thoughts of the 1st person narrator and his love interest. There is extensive and repetitive discussion of their feelings and the problems with their love life, which after a while seemed to me to be filler to make the book longer. (This may be why I gave up on it the first time.)

Some the word choices are odd. It took some time for me to grasp that a "vector" is a location, not a direction. Some of the phrasing is quite original, and not all of it works well. There was one sentence that I would copy verbatim if I could find it again. It went something like, "My thoughts were aimless, like tiny crustaceans wandering in the sand somewhere on the distant shores of my mind..." -- but that doesn't really do it justice. The simile was actually much more absurd and detailed. I laughed out loud and had to read it three times before I accepted that it was really there on the page in front of me.

It seems strange that the people in a society on a star system (61 Cygni) light-years from Earth and apparently many years in the future are still tied down to their Earth nationalities. There are Dutch, people who are apparently Japanese (called "Nihonian" for some reason), "Libonians" (Africans?) and "Rashadians" (Arabs?), and the narrator, MacKenzie, identifies as Canadian. Ethnicity and national origin is a strange plot point, but there it is.

That said, there is some good action (although some of it is a little hard to believe), the political intrigues are tricky and interesting, and the overall plot builds well to the climax. There are some "hard" science fiction ideas having to do with quantum theory and sufficient "handwaving" explanations to explain other aspects of the advanced technology. The protagonist, MacHenzie, is an archetypal space opera hero whose main flaw is his lengthy descriptions of his feelings.

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the end of the first page, I realized I had read this book before, but couldn't recall enough of it to feel that reading it was repetitive, so here I am, a third of the way through again. I recall feeling satisfied at the ending on my first read through because I predicted it accurately. I'll find out in a few hours...