2 out of 4 stars
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Tristan Smith and The Alien Building Site by K. P. Hogan is a science fiction novel about space exploration and colonization as the alliance tries to beat the Russian and Chinese to a secret discovery hidden on Mars, and it details the first entry into an expected six-book series about Tristan’s explorations in space.
We are thrust into the story in medias res and have no clue what is going on, and then Tristan begins thinking about previous and better moments in his tour of duty while waiting for the computer to boot up. There is a sense of urgency in this moment, but it is never resolved because we immediately go back in time to previous events in his life and this introduction is carried over to the next novel.
This work is very ambitious in what it tries to achieve, but it falls short in multiple ways and never quite reaches its full potential. The formatting and general editing were some of the largest problems I found with the book: for example, everything is left-aligned and then there are random double spaces between different sections to represent scene breaks, but some of these breaks don’t really make sense in the context of the story. In one passage, there is a break after Tristan puts a plate of food on the table and before he tells his daughter and wife that he is going to miss having breakfast with them. It didn’t feel like there should have necessarily been a break here, and this sort of improper pause shows up fairly frequently throughout the book.
The story is told entirely in present tense, which was awkward to get used to at first but actually worked fairly well by the end of the story. It gives it a sort of urgent feel that drives the action at various points, but the fact that the main character is looking back almost twenty years into his past and still in present tense felt a little awkward.
The characters are fairly well put together and one of the strongest parts of the story, and I think Tristan and Alex were the ones that came across best. The opening of the story is intriguing in setting up the world of these books, and we wonder what happened and who attacked them and killed the night crew, but there is a lot of repetition in the action that makes it feel like reading the same thing over and over again. For example, Tristan runs to the bridge several times in a row, making the action feel repetitious. It also doesn’t get resolved by the end of the story, which was sort of disappointing.
Tristan Smith and The Alien Building Site by K. P. Hogan had potential, but it dropped the ball in so many different ways that it is difficult to want to continue despite ending with multiple threads unresolved. I give it a 2 out of 4 star rating because it had entertaining moments but was full of the aforementioned problems. I think the author would benefit greatly by cleaning up a few things throughout, like better editing and formatting, and end up with a much higher quality story.
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Tristan Smith and The Alien Building Site
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