Teaser

A young man fleeing his homeworld. A criminal with a conscience. A deadly assassin. All drawn together by fate, yet none of them can say why . . .

Review

Richard S. McEnroe was one of my surprise discoveries of last year. The Shattered Stars was a great little slice of space opera, charmingly of its period while still holding up, in most regards, to a modern reading. Immediately, I put the other two books in the Far Stars and Future Times series on my wish list. Unfortunately, this second book is the very definition of a difficult sophomore outing.

To get the obvious out of the way, this series is not a trilogy. It’s a set of unrelated stories. That means no more adventures for the dynamic crew of the previous book, instead we get a whole new cast of characters. My only grievance here is that the two books don’t seem to have any connective tissue. There’s nothing to prevent them taking place in the same universe, but equally nothing to suggest they do. Perhaps these would have been better marketed as standalone novels.

Like a great many science fiction novels of the twentieth century, Flight of Honour is adapted from a short story. The text of that story, I suspect, makes up much of the middle act of this book, with the other two acts tagged on to bring it up to novel length. Though at under a hundred and fifty pages, it’s still a very short novel. Sometimes, this approach works. Foundation is perhaps the best example of the fix-up, but there’s also H. Beam Piper’s Gunpowder God and Henry Kuttner’s Mutant. McEnroe’s contribution to this fine tradition, however, is less than wholly successful. The story comes across as incredibly disjointed. There’s not really enough space for all three characters to have a full arc, and the intrigue built up in the beginning is swiftly dropped as soon as we get to the content of the original short story.

While the prose is good, and the style engaging enough to see me complete this book in a single sitting, Flight of Honour overall feels very flat. Nothing about the world stands out. perhaps that is due to the sheer volume of space opera I have ingested over the years, and perhaps in the nineteen-eighties this was mind-blowing stuff, but to me, right now, it’s strangely lacklustre.

Nowhere near the level of The Shattered Stars, Fight of Honour is proof of a single author’s variability. Werther the final volume of this makeshift series can reclaim my favour remains to be seen.

Book Stats

• Far Stars and Future Times (#2)
• Published in 1984 by Orbit
• 149 pages