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Dexta [Mass Market Paperback]

C J Ryan (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 18 July 2008
In the vast galactic empire of the thirty-third century, bureaucracy rules–and brains and beauty are the keys to success. Now one governmental bombshell will have to use her every resource to stop a planetwide mutiny.…

Dexta

Inside the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, Gloria VanDeen is a low-level bureaucrat. But she is no faceless cog. The stunning, cunning beauty happens to be the current Emperor’s ex-wife and sometime playmate–a distinct advantage when disorder erupts on one of the small planets she oversees. For Gloria’s personal life has catapulted her into the limelight, and an off-Earth assignment is just what she needs to get back to work. But the situation may be trickier than she imagines.…

For decades, the docile creatures of Mynjhino have been dominated by the humans of the corporate giant GalaxCo. Now a rebellious few have gotten hold of antique semiautomatic rifles–and are mowing down their Imperial overlords. Gloria has given her body and soul to Dexta, to great effect. But when trying to broker peace with the Myn, even that may not be enough....

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Product details

  • Mass Market Paperback: 451 pages
  • Publisher: Bantam Books (18 July 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0553587765
  • ISBN-13: 978-0553587760
  • Product Dimensions: 10.7 x 2.6 x 17.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,454,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars meet gloria 11 Jan 2007
By Paul Tapner TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
It's the future, and humanity is spreading out across the galaxy, colonising new worlds and meeting alien races on the way. Humans have formed an empire to run everything, and all the bureaucracy of it is handled by the department of extraterrestial affairs, or dexta.

Gloria vandeen, stunning beauty and ex wife of the current emperor, is an employee of dexta. This is a rather cut throat organisation where it's very hard to progress and you have to be strong to survive. When aliens on a far flung world start to kill the humans there, she has to investigate the situation.

The book takes about one hundred pages to get going, but it's an interesting one hundred pages as it sets up this future scenario very well. And although gloria may be stunningly good looking, that's not enough to succeed in her line of work. You have to be strong and smart with it, so we get an interesting depiction of a woman fighting to be taken seriously.

The future world of this story is one where the religion of the spirit has held sway for a few centuries, and that encourages people to have less hangs up about live and love and nudity. Thus gloria will use her figure to her advantage when she can, although constant references to how much flesh she's exposing do get a bit tiresome.

It's an interesting future history, and a quite appealing heroine. The plot develops nicely and has a few good twists and turns.

A little rough around the edges writing wise at times, and certainly not great literature, but not a bad read
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Sci-Fi bureaucrats with a twist 25 Feb 2008
By Jain
Format:Mass Market Paperback
When reading space opera, each story has to have a unique viewpoint, interesting technology or characters to make it standout and draw the reader to keep reading and Dexta has this.

You always hear that governments/empires/kingdoms are run by bureaucrats but always somewhere else. In this novel we see how the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs (or Dexta) runs over two thousand planets in the empire. The civil servants in Dexta are chosen and weeded out from the chaff in brutal Darwinian process in the lower levels to achieve promotions based on how you succeed with Personalities reflecting either a sheep, dog, mole, tiger or a lion. Gloria, as we meet her, is a level XIII bureaucrat, who is a tiger (beautiful but lethal) who is responsible for managing a sector of space with over a dozen planets. She uses her appearance and her brains, with emphasis on displaying as much of her spectacular body in scanty clothing as possible to distract people to get what she wants. Its hard to see how this strategy works but its pulled off with humour and wit keeping the plot rolling, from the offices and imperial palace on earth to a frontier world in rebellion at the edge of the empire with weird native alians, greedy star spanning corporations, machiavellian politics and the manipulation of media by all involved.

The story is told mainly from the heroines viewpoint with plenty of twists as the story went on to keeping me reading till the early hours. It was a good buy and a great read, now I've ordered the rest of the series. Sci-fi light reading at its enjoyable finest.
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Amazon.com: 3.1 out of 5 stars  15 reviews
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Not impressed 29 July 2005
By A. Benenson - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Dexta is blend of science fiction and soft-core erotica, a space opera about liberated beautiful women using all of their assets to get things done.

The science in this science fiction is quite unimaginative and seems mostly borrowed from other novels of similar quality. But Dexta does not claim to be hard sci-fi, so we won't dwell on that. The fiction part starts out very promising, with an interesting and witty description of the inner workings of a galactic empire, the bureaucracy running it, the excesses of the court and so on. But, starting somewhere in the middle of the book, it gradually deteriorates to a pitiful and ridiculous level of a support plot for a romance novel. And I neither like nor understand romance novels.

A good third of the text, of almost every page, is dedicated to people having sex, thinking about sex, or talking about sex, or, at the very least, to discussions of how little clothes all characters are wearing and how well their assets look when covered by 90% transparent dresses. Constant repetetive references to the sexuality and visual appeal of the heroine are mildly interesting in the beginning, boring towards the middle and simply annoying in the end, when the disintegration of the plot and the constant locker-room quality of sexual innuendo make reading unbearable. Imagine Pamela Anderson running for president on the strength of her bust and you'll get the idea. Don't get me wrong, I like erotic stories as much as the next guy, but this was just not up to the level. I can imagine teenage boys liking this, but hardly anyone else. I would recommend a decent sci-fi book and a copy of playboy instead.

Two stars because I am feeling generous and because I did enjoy the first half of the book.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars A waste of money and time 3 Jan 2006
By Chuckpa - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Mass Market Paperback
The problem with this book is that it fails on every genere it's trying to work. It's a lousy science fiction novel, a non-erotic erotic novel and an unromantic romance novel.

Look, if the erotic writing was at least detailed enough to arouse then it could be lumped in with Spaceways and have done with it. But it fails. It's all description of skimpy outfits and cuts to the next scene.

As for adventure Even Spaceways had more action, heck, even The Alien Trace (an eroto-sci-fi work in the 80s) beats this.

I don't know why a sequel was published, but I hope somebody sat down with the author and said:

"These are your choices: read a few penthouse letters and do better with the erotica, read science fiction and try to be original, or go actually have sex or an adventure so you can write about both or either with some authenticity"

Do not buy this book.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars If it were at least fun, it wouldn't be so bad 13 Nov 2005
By L. N. Hammer - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Alas, it is no satire. If it were satire, Our Heroine would not be right Every Single Time (even when she's being stupid), and the author would be sniggering at her instead of with her. It's amazing how well she can bend other people to her will with only a single speech, or a single flash of her nipples.

It's also amazing how often Our Heroine is both average and extraordinary. She's a mid-level bureaucrat AND the Emperor's ex-wife. Everyone who's anyone is beautiful AND she's gorgeous even by those standards.

What we have here is not satire but Mary Sue. And a badly written one at that.
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