4 out of 4 stars
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The galaxy is divided into two parts. The Sovereignty and the Commonwealth are on the brink of war. This is what Sixth Prime by Dan O’Brien brings to the table. This is the first book in “The Prime Saga” series. It is a sci-fi action novel set in humanities future and encompasses the whole galaxy.
The story opens by introducing the artist Ale Euclid. He lives on the planet Nyan and makes a good living for himself as a painter. That is until he is murdered, this gives rise to the enigmatic sentence “fifteen remain”. Sluga Mining Trust commissions one of their detectives to find out what happened.
In another part of the galaxy, the Dimidium-Bet waystation is attacked by the Sovereignty. The Commonwealth responds to the distress call and engages the Sovereignty fleet. Fleet admiral Leahy of the Sovereignty fleet issues the order to withdraw, but not before destroying the waystation.
In yet another part of the Galaxy, a prisoner is helped to escape from the prison he was in. Only to be led to another prison where his benefactors want him to enter and extract yet another prisoner.
The Sluga mining Trust set up a helium mining facility on a long dead ice-moon. The only problem is, the ghosts of the Moror, the original inhabitants of the moon start causing problems. They are led by “The Devourer” and they attack the mining staff.
All of these parts lay the groundwork for a complicated story where there are two plots running concurrently, though each plot seems to the same though with different players. The main plot involves the Initiates against the Primes. At the start of the story, there are 16 Primes.
This is an epic story, with many characters involved in many different situations. At first, there is little overlap between the parts, but as the story moves on they start to come together. I found keeping track of everything at the beginning to be quite hard, but as the story moved on it became easier. There are many diverse characters, all three dimensional, with very distinct characters. The interaction between these characters is very convincing and helps to keep the plot moving forward at a brisk pace. You will never be bored while reading this.
I especially love the descriptions of the epic space battles. At times I really thought I was there and had to hide from the onslaught happening all around me. I found very little I didn’t like unless you count the ending. It is very obviously left wide open for the follow-on books bringing very little closure to what happened in the book.
Despite being left open for the follow-on books I really enjoyed this novel and can’t wait to read the rest of the series. I only found two very small grammar mistakes in the whole book. There also was one part in the court where Fleet Admiral Leahy was accused of over 400 counts of genocide, and over 200,000 counts of attempted genocide. I find this number to be very unlikely, and think the author used the wrong word in genocide. I could be wrong though so didn’t count it as an error, just as something that seemed wrong at the time of reading it. This means that I am very willing to give this book a rating of 4 out of 4 stars. I believe this story will appeal to anyone who likes sci-fi, epic space battles, or even stories about good versus evil.
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Sixth Prime
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