Green Tee Readings

While it’s not properly a book I read in 2010, this does seem like a good book to restart some hot book logging action*. Since my initial thoughts on John M Ford’s The Princes of Air are almost nonexistent, but there are excellent reasons for that.

Princes is the story of three friends, their goals of greatness, and their journey to accomplishing that greatness. It could be classified as space opera, which is a bit of a marvel for how short the novel is. That shortness, my paperback is a mere 248 pages long, is why I have almost no concrete thoughts about the book. Within that small frame, Ford packs in the three friends, information about the class and political structures of his universe, the education system, commerce habits, and medical and robotic technology. That’s a lot to pack in, and I never felt that I got a Stephenson-esque info-dump.

With the amount of information packed in the novel, and the small space with which to work, Ford has a lot of things happen Off Screen. I’d guess that a bit more than five years pass during the book and my guess for an upper bound is a decade. Less than five years makes Orden Obeck’s rise in the diplomatic corps meteoric, more than a decade strains my concept of how friends interact over long periods apart.

If you’ve read any John M. Ford before, you know a bit about what you’re getting into: a book with a simple premise (three best friends and their SPACE ADVENTURES!!!!) that works on a few levels at once, and that I, at least, have to read a few times to figure out what really happened and how I react. I’d love to see what kind of Manhattan apartments Ford would have designed had he been an architect, creative use of space indeed.

Princes was a quick, absorbing read, one that would be beyond my abilities as a reviewer even if I were far more practiced and polished, and will probably remain so even after a few re-reads. If SF holds any interest to you, find a good used bookstore and pick up a copy this.

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