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]

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.