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 bad: Just about everything else. The characters are are all one-dimensional, unchanging, completely not believable in how they behave, and as a reader, you don’t particularly care whether they 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.
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.
Rating: 2 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
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