SQUEEE! Publisher's Weekly Review of Threshold -- and it's good!

[seawasp]

Either this is a late-emerging review, or I somehow missed it before.

EDIT: It seems to have vanished from that link, too. Are reviews over a week old no longer accessible without subscription?

It's not a long review, as you can see by the whole thing here, but it's nicely positive in tone and despite one "understatement to the point of almost wrong" (saying the Bemmie technology is  "millennia" old rather than 65 million years old), it's a good overview that isn't very spoilery at all. It includes  this excellent line:"This genial, fast-paced sci-fi espionage thriller is light in tone and hard on science and a fine choice for any collection."

I couldn't really hope for a better review from a real source, eh?

Wish I could've seen one for GCA, but I suspect they generally only do hardcovers.

Comments

[seawasp]

Glad your cow-orker liked Boundary (so now they can try Threshold!); but I must admit to some puzzlement as to your being satisfied by Threshold's ending which most people say is an AAAAAAAAAIIII! Cliffhanger! when you seem UNsatisfied by GCA's ending, which is about as much closure as I could figure out being POSSIBLE with that setting.

The sequel to Threshold is in process now. You waited four years for Threshold because it took Eric that long to do his part. I finished the first draft of Threshold about the time the paperback of Boundary came out.

The sequel to GCA is "if GCA earns out and some more". So it depends on how well it sells. Minimum is about 14,500 copies total, I think.

[seawasp]

Veeeeeery Eeeeeenteresting.

I can sort of see how that perception could happen; GCA is a grand-scale space opera and the threats are grand-scale and may seem imminent, while Threshold is a more personal-scale and the threats are being addressed one at a time, in order, etc.

Yet in actuality, at the end of Threshold you have a clock ticking in several areas, one of them on an hour-scale importance (get power from Munin over to Nebula Storm in time to keep the dusty plasma drive running as a radiation shield) and the others still heavily constrained (can we keep the life support systems running? What are our supplies like? Who's hurt on Munin, since several of the people onboard were being evacuated from Odin? How long will it take to repair Nebula Storm's reactor? How will they deal with the fact that they're living in something like 1/10th gravity?) And that's not even touching the political bomb that's about to detonate, and the wild card of the fact that Hohenheim is still alive.

On GCA side (at least as far as Our Heroes know) the only REAL timebomb is the Molothos, and they've established that as a threat that's at least a year out.

[wyldc.livejournal.com]

Well, GCA definitely shows the grand scale viewpoint(just look at the arena), but the end of GCA almost feels like the set up for a more "local" (just the Sol system) interlude.

The more immediate questions at the end of GCA were (for me), what hoops will they have to jump through to get a cohesive mission together to return? Will Ariane manage to hold onto leadership, or will political factions on Earth try to replace her (or stop the return entirely)? Are the strange forces sealed away in Ariane truly contained? When will they start to eat through the containment?

Yes the Molothos are a year out, but its a year where every second counts and humans can be very stubborn. Further, it is a year that will shake the fairly complacent society of Sol. I admit I'm looking forward to what happens next, and not just on what happens with their return to the arena (for which I have many more questions).

[seawasp]

Well, I can tell you that if there is a sequel (pleasepleasepleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease), I will be trying to minimize the political aspects in terms of how much it directly ensnares the main characters. There WILL be tremendous political and social impact -- no doubt about it -- but I don't want to end up in the trap David Weber did with Honor Harrington, where he's been forced to change the basic nature of the series to be more political simply because of the position Honor has risen to. I may, like him, HAVE to do it at some point, but at least I want to keep the series focused on mostly-individual action and choice and adventure for several more books.

I did actually write about 40,000 words of a sequel, and it was that which convinced me that I wanted to avoid the politics. Even with that one, though, I had them back to the Arena before 30,000 words had passed. The Arena is where things happen and where things have to be dealt with.

[suburbanbanshee.livejournal.com]

The nice thing about keeping politics in the background is that you can paint an interesting sf picture with just a few references.

Those racing and extreme sport people are going to be a bit boggled. It'd be like dressage suddenly becoming an important military training element again.

[seawasp]

Yep. The USR community (Unlimited Space Racing) is going to be the center of Arena pilot recruitment.

And painting the picture is what I want to do. I want to give you enough of an idea of the political upheaval so that it's clear how much of a mess things are, but not spend most of my time WRITING about it.