Is the EASC completely incompetent?

[Shawn]

I enjoyed this book as my glowing review states. However, I have a serious problem with how GS Jennsen portrayed the EASC.

It wasn't the big things. I get that they are an old bureaucracy. I liked how Jennsen showed the difference between how they and the Senecans react to the same information. highlights the problems of too many rules and regulations. This was good.

My problem was that I couldn't tell if the Alliance military personnel were supposed to be uniformly incompetent to cartoonish levels or not. A good military can lose a war. They lost the previous war, but seemed to have executed it well. Alex's mother rose high based on her competency, and seems to think other are competent. She is sometimes held back by the rules and regulations. This makes sense.

But every orderly and receptionist stammers "um, er, yes she's in her office." Every. Time. They seem incompetent and undisciplined. Some were the gatekeeper to an important person and would be asked that often. That made it feel less like an illustration of the old dinosaur mentality and more cheap shots. Though it may have been unintentional.

Then on the flip side you had the hyper-intellegent, hyper-comptent beuocrats that could repeat verbatim 12 digit long policy numbers. These policies meant 'I don't have to do this work right now' and made sense. But the policy number? Which is that comically long? I found it detracted from the novel. And I'm not sure if the EA military is supposed to be filled with buffoons or ambitionless bureaucrats.

It's a small thing, it just happened so often. Perhaps was highlighted by the audiobook version. But it was definitely there.

This was one of the biggest problems I had with the book, and it's pretty minor. I mean, after I wrote a glowing review G.S. Jennsen liked it. When I went back to read it I realized two things. I misspelled her name! And second, there was a specific criticism I meant to added. I fixed both and I hope she doesn't feel I was being unkind.

[G.S.]

I do not, Shawn :). I appreciate the constructive criticism and will take it to heart.

P.S.: Apologies for the delayed response. Goodreads doesn't notify me about posts like this, so I have to review every book's page to spot any new posts or questions.

[Jon]

I glanced at this to help me decide if I wanted to read this book and it looks really spoilerish so I stopped glancing. :)