The Dog From Hell, Chris Bunch

It is often difficult to define what makes a good piece of writing, or a good writer. In a genre that is so story driven as SF or Fantasy that can be especially true. The tricks of writing that pull you in can be very subtle indeed. Bad writing though is a lot easier to spot. Chris Bunch could be a good writer, but I think he lacks the scholarship necessary for the scope of the book he attempted.

The Dog from hell is a space adventure, or an attempt at one. We are intended to cheer for a small group of adventurers called Star Risk, who are attempting to get revenge on Cerberus, a large security concern who successfully squelched them. What follows is clearly intended to be a high octane thriller/ space drama. It fails short of its mark.

I think this book fails because the author does not actually know very much about the kind of thing he is writing about. He does not know how the military works, how special ops work, what type of people are involved and how they think. He does not understand how technology plays a roll in this field of human behavior and what its purpose is. If he read more Tom Clancy maybe and then brought some of his understanding to an imagined situation with projected technology then it could have worked.

This makes the action unbelievable, which then proceeds to make the characters flat, which leads to a fairly uninteresting read that does not hold the attention at all. I left this book unfinished, maybe 90% read, and will get rid of it at the earliest opportunity. Not an all time great.