The Aspirant was another book in my pool for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2), in which I am a Judge looking for the best in a group of self-published SF novels. It's one of a few novels that I wound up finishing from my initial pool, which says something for how readable it is in its tale of a young 17 year old boy prodigy who gets caught up in a Young Adult space opera thriller/conspiracy. Unfortunately, it wasn't one that I loved in the end, both for reasons of me not loving the genre and for some major flaws with how the story unfolded.
This will thus be another mini-review, due to my lack of really having too much to say on this one, so I'll quickly explain after the jump:
The Aspirant tells the story of 17 year old Basch Loftt, son of a prominent retired member of the galactic navy, and a boy who wants to follow in those footsteps...when he gets caught in a major galactic conspiracy after he unknowingly chases down a pair of assassins who are then murdered to cover up their misdeeds. Thereafter Basch finds himself taken on board a naval ship run by what turns out to be a corrupt intelligence agent, and has to find ways to avoid getting killed by that agent as he has to gather allies, figure out what's going on, and well expose the conspiracy and save the day.
There are unfortunately a bunch of problems with this novel. First is not one necessarily that's a problem with the novel itself but with me and genre mismatch - this is a story in which we follow a teen prodigy who seemingly has the answer or technological knowhow to deal with almost every situation, even when the adults around him do not, and so it kind of feels like the protagonist is obnoxiously too perfect. This might work for Young Adult or really Middle Grade readers seeking a perfect teen to follow who can do everything, but it was kind of grating to this older reader.
More of a problem with the book however is that the author seemingly had no idea how to tie things together and relied upon the same plot twists OVER and OVER. Most notably, Basch finds himself caught or near-caught by the conspiracy at basically the end of each chapter, such that it feels like every time he gets away the author had no clue how to move things forward and just fell back to the "Well they've found him so now he has to move to the next place." This prevents characters and parts of the setting from having any impact, as it's just ridiculous as the plot repeats the same sequence of "run to next place/ally, see black van with enemy agents there 5 seconds later, run away to next place/ally". None of those allies stick around or really are memorable on their own, and usually they serve just to allow Basch to wow them and to join forces with him even as things get rough...and then they're often left behind for the next set of allies.
The plot then commits another cardinal sin in its ending, where there's a plot twist as to the ultimate villain that makes no sense and makes even less impact because it's based upon the betrayal of a character we've met for 5 seconds and heard background of for barely any longer, so honestly who cares - and even if I did, the betrayal made no sense with how that character was portrayed previously.
Repetitive Plotting, characters who were paper thin other than the perfect main character, and a bad pointless ending twist kind of make this one a loser, even if it reads well enough to go by fairly quickly.
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