Hidden Empire (Saga of Seven Suns) [Paperback]

By the time I was about halfway through this turgid potboiler the biggest impression I was was one of amazement.

Amazement about how it could be that the publishers were prepared to print this rubbish, let alone sign Anderson on for a series of 7 volumes of it!

The plot is predictable, obvious and hackneyed and the setting is sci-fi lite, sub-star trek. The writing is simply a list of events, punctuated by ill-fitting dialog. Nothing gives the reader the impression that the author enjoyed producing this. There's no passion, depth, poetry or soul.

The worst things though are the characters, which are two-dimensional and indistinct from each other, and the stilted, turgid dialog which falls out of their cardboard mouths. People, past or future, simply do not speak to each other like this. Practically every exchange is simply cringeworthy.

Unpickupable.

Our Kev. is the sort of person who likes numbers, he has the world record for book signings, and states without a hint of irony that he has out-worded Tolstoy in one of the prefaces to this saga. It is clear that he can string words together to make a product, and this book is the first of a batch of product.
I have now read them all, and I feel a duty to review them through this, the first book, in order to warn you if you are considering embarking on this saga.

The books are like fodder, they provide a balance of sustenance and padding that just about keep you engaged. Don't get me wrong, having a few months worth of plodding narrative can be a very good thing if you are sick, or are trying to avoid having an internal dialogue, much like a ten thousand piece jigsaw is.

My warning lies in the danger that you may well pick this book up cheaply (perhaps in a bundle with its sequels) and think that there is no harm in wasting a bit of time on a journey or such like.
Sadly with each book your investment in time makes the next book more necessary, and the next and so on. With this our Kev is a master, the first two books set the scene, the next two barely advance the plot, the fifth begins a resolution and stops almost mid-sentence, the sixth begins with a false ending and then moves the goal posts, and the seventh... well I'm not convinced there aren't another 47 manuscripts under his mattress.
If you need some sort of bland therapy embark upon this saga, if you like good SciFi read Iain M Banks, Orson Scott Card or almost anyone else instead.

One more thing - it may just be me, but every time the words, 'someplace', 'anyplace' and 'gotten' are used in written English, I wince; I winced a lot during these books. I also got very bored of his use of the word 'slick' meaning 'wet', at one point it appeared in almost every paragraph (perhaps I should aim my annoyance at the corporate proofreader though).

It is undeniable that the are some very profound concepts lurking within these books, but it is hard to find evidence that Kev noticed them at all, while he was knocking out his wordcount. He certainly managed to avoid anything bordering on the profound, even though he might well have.

I agree with most of the previous reviewers.. This book is actually an okay start. Unfortunately I am a junkie for completion so I went ahead and ordered the rest of the series which quickly becomes really dire stuff.

Starting off with the good:

A lot of people complained about the short chapters - I don't mind them. I have kids so it's harder to get time to read and the short chapters make the book easy to read over your cornflakes in the morning, etc - 5 mins here and there gets you through it.

He has constructed a nice, if simplistic universe here - all the standard ingredients: human/alien empires/colony worlds/miner race (roamers) and mysterious artifacts & aliens. In the early books, the King versus Chairman thing is an okay interplay.

The bad:
Okay I know I'm reading sci-fi so things don't have to make sense but the sheer amount of impossible things that happen beggars belief and will have you gnashing your teeth at times, and character depth just isn't there.

- Scale is way off. Planets are like villages in the wild-west. The average population of a planet seems to be a few hundred "hardy" colonists. If you land on a world, anywhere, you will soon bump into the colonists that are on it.

- Central characters keep getting weird and "wonderful" powers for no good reason. In this series, if you fall into a sun you are more likely to become some kind of a ridiculous fire-creature than to die. The plot seems to rely on impossible coincidences and outlandish magic rather than clever writing.

- Each member of each species is identical to each other. For example all the roamers have the same principles and beliefs.

- We are given no idea of how the ildiran stardrive is meant to work, but it seems to be like a souped up version of a normal engine running on hydrogen that can just plain crank you around faster... accelerating and decelerating into star systems and hopping from planet to planet within a star system in minutes. No mention of relativity or how it's effects are circumvented.

- Plot holes galore everywhere really test your patience.

- Plenty of dumb filler chapters where e.g. people "dance on trees" to ignite some stupid worldforest spirit.

- traders move from planet to planet with a small cargo container of food. I live in a small sized town and thousands of trucks of food are needed to sustain it each day. The idea of interstellar vegetable deliveries in truck-sized ships is ludicrous. Plus there seem to be only about 5 traders in the whole galaxy.

- interspecies breeding is no problem whatsoever.

- Don't get me started on thism this kind of mystic force that binds the ildiran race. What a poor idea and so inconsistently implemented.

- he keeps rehashing old ground.. constantly. Most times character X is mentioned he has a paragraph explaining X's history.

- he keeps using the same descriptive terms - "Impenetrable diamond warglobe", "mysterious black kilkiss robot", etc.

- laws of physics are ignored. We have lots of things like sound in vacuums, people breathing in gas giant atmosphere, total ignorance of the scale of interplanetary and interstallar travel, magic creatures, etc.

It really felt to me as though he was making it up as he went along with little or no forward planning or structure. His goal was to fill out and sell 7 books and worse fool me as after reading the 1st book I said "ah sure I might as well order the rest" and so his tactic worked in my case. However he'd be better off writing smaller, better thought-out books as it might encourage repeat purchases - as it is I won't be buying any more Kevin Anderson books.

Life is too short to get started on this series... it's frankly a bit embarrasingly bad.

My fav sci-fi books are Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, Orson Scott Wells, etc. I wanted to like it.. I really did... but it was just so bad.!