The good
- I love the premise of the book, which from page 1 tells you that humanity has already lost, conquered and nearly driven to extinction by an alien race thousands of years ago.
The not so good
Just about everything else:
- The characters are all one-dimensional, unchanging, and completely not believable in how they behave.
- As a reader, you don’t particularly care whether the characters succeed or fail.
- The main hero is named Jonnie, is improbably confident and intelligent, is completely unphased to discover alien races, has no weakness, and seems equally adept with a club as he is at intergalactic diplomacy.
- The one female character is a damsel in distress that needs rescuing.
- The story develops in a weird, jerky manner, leaping forward months or years at a time, and treating massive developments like they are no big deal (e.g., a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe learning hyper-advanced technology in a matter of months).
- The alien civilizations are poorly developed.
- The technologies are a silly mix of extremely advanced (teleportation across galaxies!) to bizarrely primitive (we still have to manually mine gold!).
- The dialog is stilted.
Overall
I’m not sure why this is such a classic. It’s a tiny bit better than the movie, but that doesn’t say much.
