This book starts out sounding great, but the style soon gets tiresome. It is written in the choppy, military narration used by ElevenLabs and Tiktok text-to-speech to create content for YouTube shorts and Facebook Reels. It is packed with muted hyperbole couched in strong simile and metaphor, enhancing emotion by suppressing it.

Every action is qualified, described and slotted into a pattern, and the same memes repeat over and over. They’re good memes, often quite creative, but endlessly repeating any writing pattern becomes irritating.

The other stylistic choice that doesn’t work is the lack of quotation marks on the dialogue. I see no usefulness in this affectation and find it a niggling reminder that constantly pulls me out of involvement with the characters as I wonder who is speaking.

Another danger of these memes is that having too much material at hand induces the writer to try too hard to be artistic. At the mid-point of the book the story takes a holiday, replaced by a whole chapter of description that doesn’t seem to enhance the plot or characters.

One strength of the writing is the solid proofreading, although I note the only grammar that caught them up was the usual misuse of “lay” and “laid.”

In “…they had laid on their backs,” the past participle of “lay” is “had lain.”

This is a two-part story that would perhaps work better as two separate episodes, held together by one line of conflict. The first half is a bit of a downer, as it follows in creditable detail the final downfall of Earth. The carryover into Part 2 is a minor puzzle that grows into a threat to the new colony’s existence. I found the scale and focus of the second half to be more engaging. Using the point of view of fewer characters allows us to get to know them better.

As a reviewer, it matters little to me whether this book was written by AI or (heavens preserve us) written by a human who has copied a style created by AI. The work bears many of the strengths and weaknesses of artificial art, which at this stage produces mediocre results.

A run-of-the mill Space Opera full of unapologetic schlock and mom-and-apple-pie philosophy.

Three stars

PS

I think the author needs to disclose his sources as a matter of artistic honesty, but that’s his choice.