SOJALS rating:

Awful (1/5)

I first read this on the 10th July 2002.

In the future FTL travel and an almost instantaneous FTL communications have been discovered. Humankind has spread through at least a small part of the galaxy, colonising planets and or simply living in space habitats.

There's an interstellar Internet, the Nexus Comnet, providing real-time communication links between the human worlds.

Then there's Admiral Loren Cantrell with her trusty staff, TJ Briggs and Alexis Fonteccio, ordered to make post-haste for the planetary HuteNamid, to the American Indian colony there.

She's to escort a Network Special Investigator, Stephen Ridenour, to investigate strange goings-on on that remote planet. In particular there's a scientist whose work, previously disregarded, may in fact be massively significant to the future of the Nexus Comnet.

The only problem is that our Network Special Investigator is already a bigger mess than anything they could expect to find on the planet. Ridenour may be brilliant, but he's so out of his depth, out of his head and out of his league, that he's unlikely to hold together long enough to start his mission, let alone finish it. It's his first job, and quite likely his last. Furthermore the antipathy between spacers and planet-dwellers is so deep-seated that there's little hope of any unbiased communication between himself and the colony.

This was, even with all the painful self-analysis that young Mr Ridenour puts himself though, quite good. I did have a bit of a problem that, even by the end of of the novel, I still didn't know what had been going on. Perhaps some final chapters had been cut, or simply forgotten. So many things weren't explained, although of course, Stephen Ridenour's personal problems are dwelt upon and explained in profound, excessive detail.

What's it got? Interstellar internet, American Indians, damaged goods and young love.