Through The Hostage – An Honest Review

Through The Hostage

J C Steel

I was gifted a pdf copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and here it is.

Khyria Ilan is a commander in the Cortii, the most elite mercenary organisation in known space. With a past she can’t remember, and commanders who would love to see her dead, her future is likely to be short: her command faces their ultimate test to prove their right to survive. When the odds are impossible, sometimes the only thing to do is play the game …

Through The Hostage is a complex sci-fi novel that, in my opinion, bites off more than it can chew. I really liked many of the characters J C Steel created; Khyria Ilan is flawed, and dangerous, and complicated, and very interesting, but it felt as though not enough was shown about her, from the beginning it’s revealed that pretty much everyone around her wants her dead, but at no point is a solid reason given, nor is it revealed why she has apparently abandoned her command. Jack is another interesting character, and I would have liked to have seen more of his efforts to learn about and understand this alien world he finds himself in.

Many of the other characters have an equal amount of potential, but it feels too much as if the reader only gets a surface view of things. There’s the suggestion of so much, but not enough detail to help the reader navigate this strange world.

Adding to my difficulties with this book are the details you do get about the organisation Khyria Ilan and her group are part of; I suspect J C Steel has limited military knowledge or experience because the group describes themselves as mercenaries, when everything in the book indicates they are in fact part of an army working for a council of some kind, and they undergo up to 10 years of training before taking a test to determine if they are fit to join the ‘army’ as a fully qualified unit (as someone with, admittedly limited, military experience, it seemed very unrealistic that what was essentially a platoon-sized unit would spend such an excessive amount of time in training before qualifying; training may continue after qualification but in general the training to qualify in an army is measured in months, not years, even for special forces units).

I found little in the way of tension in the book; all the way through the reader is told that Khyria Ilan is under constant threat of assassination, but the few attempts that take place happen off-screen – as it were – and seem so feeble as to be easily dealt with. Because of that, I found the book fairly flat; even when it finally reached the much-mentioned Crossing, there seemed little in the way of danger, and it was all over with far too quickly and easily.

I think with some work, this could be a very good novel, it’s longer than it really needs to be in my opinion, has themes that could be more fully explored, and it lacks enough tension to keep the reader hooked and get them concerned about the characters, but it does end with a very nice scene with Jack back home and unable to tell anyone about where he’s been and what he’s been doing and I’m pleased about that.

Nimisha’s Ship

Anne McCaffrey

Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense was the body-heir of Lady Rezalla and, as such, was the heiress of one of the First Families on Vega III. But even as a child she eschewed the formalities of her aristocratic background and was happiest in her father’s shipyard. By the time she was in her twenties she was the designer of the most advanced space yacht in the galaxy, and was owner of the Rondymense shipyards.

It was on a test of her Mark 5 prototype that things went wrong. In an empty space field, suitable for test runs, she was suddenly confronted with the boiling white pout of a wormhole, was sucked in, only to be thrown out into an unknown dimension of space. She was not the first. As she explored this new, unfamiliar section of the universe she found traces of ships that had been marooned over many centuries.

Not knowing if she would ever return to the world she knew, Nimisha chose to land on ‘Erewhon’ – fascinating, terrifying, beautiful and frightening – and inhabited not only by three survivors of a previous Vegan ship but by something else…

This has long been one of my favourite sci-fi books, and I still enjoy it whenever I pick it up for a fresh read, but my tastes have changed over the years and I now wish it was written in a harder style. The story is decently written and accessible, with no complicated technological terms to confuse the reader, and likeable characters, especially  Nimisha herself; in addition to that there’s some nice, if not extensive, descriptive detail and the aliens are nicely imagined.

I do find that the situations are coped with a little too easily at times, which takes away any real sense of struggle or danger, and that’s a shame. Even the attacks connected to the fight over Nimisha’s inheritance are treated too casually, and at the end of the book there’s no resolution to that situation, it just seems to be forgotten about.

Don’t get me wrong, this is an enjoyable book, but only if your preference is for a lighter read. This same story in the hands of someone who writes heavier, more in-depth, sci-fi could have been absolutely fabulous. That said, I still look forward to reading it again.