Vallar

Vallar
by Cindy Borgne
(4/5 stars)

This is from that old school of space opera with lasers and space ships and not a lot of highly technical explanations for everything.  It's not as cheesy as say old "Flash Gordon" serials, but it's not "hard" science fiction either.  Which is fine for people such as myself who enjoy "Star Wars" and the like.

The story takes place on Mars, which is divided into a bunch of corporate factions.  The largest faction is Marscorp, whose goal it seems is to return to Earth.  Marscorp's philosophy is that if you don't agree with us, then prepare for a hostile takeover.  (And we're not talking about buying out your stock.)

To help them with this, they recruit a couple of young psychics, Ian Connors and his friend Nate.  One day Ian has a vision of himself with a beautiful redheaded girl and becomes obsessed with finding her.  But she turns out to be part of a rival corporation, Gentech.  Ian has another vision of her in trouble during a Marscorp attack, so he goes to the battle to try and help.  But that only winds up getting Nate killed and Ian in big trouble.

As the plot progresses, Ian discovers that while he's the one with the visions, a lot of things are not what they appear.

I found the plot intriguing.  As I said at the beginning, it's not really hard sci-fi.  There aren't explanations of how everything works.  That's just as well for me, because that stuff can get tedious.  Though I was curious why radar deflection is such a big deal.  We have stealth technology on airplanes now that uses radar deflection.  There was even a prototype ship made using those principles, though it was too expensive to put into production.  Since this is in the future, shouldn't they have something better?  At the very least if radar isn't working, shouldn't they have infrared or something to spot the ship?

Other than that, some of the dialog was kind of cheesy.  Like many self-published novels it could have used another editing pass to eliminate some errors.

Overall though it was an exciting light read that's worth the discount price.

That is all.