Dark Shepherd   by Fred Gambino

My heart sank when, on opening the book, I immediately saw the words, ‘Book 1.’ This is a debut novel. The last thing I wanted was an unfinished piece by someone arrogant enough to think that there was already a market for another novel.

The prose is very careful in the beginning, describing everything in detail and hand-holding the reader through every movement in action sequences. On the whole the prose is one notch above young adult. It is all told, not shown.

The author attempts to present meticulous physics, which opens him up to scrutable errors. For example, a ship leaves a rotating orbiter without any power for covertness. The people inside feel an initial acceleration, which then goes slack before the ship stabilises and drifts silently away from the space station. But if the ship had simply undone the shackles to naturally break away, there wouldn’t have been an initial acceleration, it would just have been that the artificial gravity suddenly ceased, and that is all. There are a few moments like this early on which will itch anyone reading who has a sense of engineering. The author is convinced that Coriolis forces will be significant inside an enormous rotating ring. One ludicrous sequence has the protagonist leaping across a chasm with someone else on her shoulders, and succeeding by allowing for the effect of rotation of the body. Pursuers unencumbered by extra weight both don’t make the distance and misjudge the rotation of the environment, falling to their deaths down the deep chasm, which is itself a strange thing to imagine near the outer rim of a circular habitat. Physics and geometry do not work like that.

As the book progresses writer’s fatigue comes clearly in evidence. Typographical errors appear, and, in the last third, continuity becomes choppy. It might be my own reader fatigue, but a motorised asteroid seemed to appear from nowhere. The grand finale took place in at least three different places, with people travelling when convenient between them, making for awkward timings.

The story involves a quantum-entangled artefact, which carries a recording of the protagonist’s parents at the time they picked the child up (if you’ve already pictured Luke watching a projection given by R2D2 of Leia, then you’ve successfully established that this is almost unashamedly a Star Wars knock-off). But where did the artefact come from, where did it go, and why actually was it so valuable that the bad guys wanted it? In the end it was just an artefact of the story that added little but convenience.

The ending is left open for another book, with the team of rebels trapped at the end of an unexplored worm-hole that they successfully shut down. There they find the Dark Shepherd, a black asteroid. I don’t care, the book is thin enough that it would be worthwhile to double its size and finish the story off; I won’t be spending time or money chasing an empty need for completion. I didn’t enjoy the opener very much.