Sunday, September 24, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Caledonian Gambit by Dan Moren


The Caledonian Gambit is a SciFi spy thriller - a combination of genres that I've really enjoyed in my life.  This is Dan Moren's debut novel and well....it shows.  It seems from reading this like this is possibly the start of an intended new series (although I don't see a sequel novel scheduled on Amazon) but well, the book failed to really get me to care enough to carry on with any sequel.  There's nothing offensive or ACTIVELY irritating about this book, but there's just not a lot to like here - in better hands/editing, it's possible this story could have worked a lot better for sure.  But alas, that's not the book we have here, so this is not really a book I can much recommend.

Quick disclaimer before the jump: I "read" this book as an audiobook and the audiobook reader is in my opinion terrible - he sounds bored while reading non-dialogue, and then decides to portray accents in the dialogue in the most obnoxious ways possible - the accent of multiple characters is done as if its an extreme Irish accent and its really painful to listen to.  It's possible the book reads better on paper - if you're interested in the book, I would recommend not reading it via audiobook.

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
In a distant future, humanity has spread to the stars, relying upon gates built in star systems that keep open stable wormholes for travel between the systems.  Control of the galaxy has in large part been split between two powers - the Illyrican Empire and the Commonwealth.  The two powers have for years been enraptured in a Cold War, holding the galaxy on edge.

Eli Brody was born on the planet Caledonia, which has been occupied by the Illyricans for 20 years.  Wanting to escape the planet and wanting to follow his love of flying, he joined the Illyrican military and became a starfighter pilot.  But on his first combat mission, his squadron was destroyed and he found himself captured when an independent planet named Sabea decided to blow up its wormhole gate and exile itself from the galaxy rather than be invaded.  And for five long years, while Sabea was cut off from the world, Eli spent his life as a janitor on an underground Sabean base under an assumed name.

But when Sabea rebuilds its gate and reconnects to the rest of the galaxy, a Commonwealth Special Ops team led by Simon Kovalic comes to Eli with an offer - come back to Caledonia with them on a special mission to help them reconnect with Eli's brother, who was giving the Commonwealth intelligence about an Illyrican Superweapon that could change the course of the war.  But Eli has PTSD - hardly an asset to an untrained special agent.  And this mission could drag him back into the crosshairs of a radical insurgent group that could result in the death of not only himself, but of millions of lives.
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In general I like to start these reviews if possible with the good parts of the book.  In this book well, again, the setup is interesting, and the book DID make me curious about what was going to happen as things moved closer and closer to the climax.  That said, the book is far from unpredictable and I honestly expected one further twist which never came, and I'm not sure the book is better for it.

Really the issue here is that the characters and dialogue are just not very good in this book.  We switch off between following Kovalic and Eli more or less every chapter, and well....eh.  Eli comes across as a bit of a whiny guy who constantly makes obviously bad choices and who tries to be a wise-ass.  The issue is that well...his wisecracks just come across as annoying and while that may be somewhat intentional (it's a character defect due to his being out of his depth), having a hero who is deliberately predictably annoying isn't fun to read.  Kovalic meanwhile is a standard super-spy archetype but well...everything kind of comes laughably easy to him and you never get the feeling he's ever in any danger.  There's no suspense with him.  And while the book has occasional moments where they treat his past as having some impact on him, they're so random that they just don't connect.

Then there's the dialogue, particularly the inner monologues, which are just awful.  Eli's thought process often has him making lengthy thoughts and comparisons in short periods of time, which just do not feel like something that any real person would do.  It feels heavily artificial and like it could use a lot of editing.  The same is true of Kovalic, who occasionally will reference some event from his past with lots of explanation when it's just really not necessary - like the author is afraid the reader will get lost without an explanation for his references despite the characters not needing these explanations.  Kovalic's attempts to drive Eli forward by basically playing his shrink at times really just feel cringy as well.

And then there's the general conflict.  The major confrontation we see in this book is between the good guys and the local insurgency against the Empire, who I guess is supposed to be the evil superpower?  But we're never given any reason to see the Empire as being evil or the Commonwealth as being good - it's just what we're told.  So there's no reason to really care about that conflict, or to care about the struggle the characters feel between the extreme measures the insurgency takes and the evil the insurgency is seemingly trying to overthrow.  Like this is the problem:  the good guys aren't interesting and the general background plot is just bare bones.  There's little to hook onto (which is a problem if the intention is for this to be the first book in a series).

Again, there's nothing offensive in this book -while I didn't enjoy any of the characters, there's no one who's basically unlikable.  The plot moves at a decent pace, even if the dialogue drags it a little bit, and at times it seemed like it could have gone in interesting directions.  Alas, the book never does that.  So I wouldn't really recommend this book, even if it's not the worst book in the world.



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