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A book length introduction
Date of Review: May 8, 2001
The Bottom Line: A book length introduction? Why?
"The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story" is a science fiction novel by Stephen R. Donaldson.
Do you know how some novels start out with a third-person intro to help sketch out 'what came before'? In those introductions you don't get much in the way of characterization and even the plot and story line can get short shrift. Now lets pretend that you stretched this concept over a short novel and what do you get?
Well, in the case of "The Real Story" you get a thin novella, with hastily sketched out characters, the hint of a plot and a few basics of the story line and setting. And that's it, tune in for the next book. As I actually haven't READ the next book I can't tell you how effective this introduction is to the series. I assume that later books will fill in the the history, society and political realms around the main characters and that the initial 'pirates of the spaceways doing dirty deeds' concept will morph into something other than the pretty simplistic sketch of a story seen here: pirate stops police cruiser, pirate puts sole surviving police woman into mind slavery, pirate abuses said woman, pirate goes back to space station to try and refit his ship, pirate meets up with other pirate set on taking him down, first pirate is taken down and woman goes with second pirate after being freed by first pirate.
This is NOT a promising start to a series! I fully expect Mr. Donaldson to do the equivalent to this story line that he did with the THOMAS COVENANT series and really flesh out the characters, background and story line and make this universe come alive. He even says so in the back of the book along with what drove him to write this series! On its own, however, "The Real Story" suffers from too little depth anywhere to make for compelling reading. As I finish the later books in the series I'll do some looking back and see how well it does as an introduction.
A hint to the publishing industry: collect this series in one volume! Then "The Real Story" would serve as a true introduction to the larger work without forcing the reader to hunt down the individual volumes.
In all fairness I can't recommend this book on its own. For other readings of pirates in space check out "High Justice" by Jerry Pournelle or "The Cosmic Computer" by H. Beam Piper.
