416 pages
English language
Published May 6, 2024 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.
There are only three real powers in the Spiral: the corporate power of the Trust versus the Union's labor's leverage. Between them the Guild tries to keep everyone's hands above the table. It ain't easy.
Branded a Guild deserter, Jal "accidentally" lands a ride on a Guild ship. Helmed by an AI, with a ship's engineer/medic who doesn't see much of a difference between the two jobs, and a "don't make me shoot you" XO, the Guild crew of the Ambit is a little . . . different.
They're also in over their heads. Responding to a distress call from an abandoned planet, they find a mass grave, and a live programmer who knows how it happened. The Trust has plans. This isn't the first dead planet, and it's not going to be the last.
Unless the crew of the Ambit can stop it.
Cascade Failure is an action-packed scifi novel about a ragtag spaceship crew of misfits that gets involved in Significant Events. It's snappy and engaging, but it's not heavy on horizon-expanding content - it feels a bit like a space-opera version of a Tales of the Ketty Jay novel
Content warning Here are the problems:
At first, I thought this would be a beach read, not anything heavy or anything, just a good ol' space adventure. I made it about 90% through but gave up. Everyone from the characters to the narrators loves their 20th century idioms. It seems unlikely that either hundreds of years in the future that those idioms will survive. And there is a lot of telling instead of showing. You could probably chop fifty pages of exposition and it wouldn't affect the story line.
The blurb on the book cover mentioned that this is like a Becky Chambers' novel. Well, if you mean there are spaceships, then yes. Is it anything else like a Chambers' novel? no.
On the plus side, the characters are interesting, and the plot is ok. Two stars, it might work for you, but it didn't do anything for me.
It kind of feels like a couple of authors in recent years have taken up the challenge of John Steakley’s amazing book Armor, and L M Sagas definitely joins them. A fierce, tight-knit crew comprised of an AI spaceship, a retired soldier and a fixit girl (both ships and humans) accidentally (or maybe not so) take on a new passenger and promptly stumble into a whole bunch of crazy intertwined mysteries while dealing with old wounds.
A great read with fun characters. Well worth the time if you like a good action story with fun heroes.
