Thomas DePrima

Thomas DePrima was an early success story for Amazon’s independent publishing platforms, producing five novels between 2008 and 2010. His last book was released in 2013, and he has not been heard from since, though the nine books in the A Galaxy Unknown series continue to sell.

The first volume has a pure space opera zinger of an opening. Jenetta Carver, a young science officer on her first interstellar mission, is the last person off her exploding spaceship. Her escape pod fails to fire show more its retros, and she spends eleven years in suspended animation until she is picked up by space pirates who want to make her a sex slave. Pulp never got pulpier.

If you mute your critical faculties, it still entertains. show less

Poor Jen. All she wants to do is sit on the bridge of a starship, but the brass keep promoting her to desk jobs on space stations. But she goes Honor Harrington’s tree cat one better with her two guard jaguars.

This time, she shares the stage with Vyx, an espionage agent with a distinct Han Solo vibe. He, too, has trouble with space stations.

Yes, this series is derivative, but entertaining for all that.

Scientists rummaging around a dig site get themselves cloned by some ancient tech. Jenetta Carver, DePrima’s Honor Harrington clone, comes to the rescue.

I continue to be surprised at how readable and sometimes thoughtful this old series is.

I got this as one of my first books with a Kindle, since the Amazon recommendation engine pushed it very hard at me.

Negatives: DePrima is a bad writer. Individual sentences are often horribly clunky or confusing (one of the other reviewers here quotes the opening sentence, which is indeed a doozy). The flow of the story is frequently interrupted for awkward and tangential info-dumps, sometimes to unintentionally comic effect (as when what is supposed to be a touching family scene is broken show more up to explain flying cars). The plot - and I say this as a hardened addict of space opera - is ridiculous, in no small part because the main character is one of the most over-the-top Mary Sues I have ever encountered. And, perhaps most annoyingly to me, DePrima lacks the real science-fictional imagination, which thinks through the consequences of his premises. I am prepared to give a pass on how social life centuries from now, among the stars, still looks _just like_ turn-of-the-millennium middle class North America, because imagining different customs is very hard, and also the kind of thing which could make the characters repulsive to the author. But I am not so inclined to give a pass on the sheerly technological aspects. To name just the one which annoyed me the most: if you are going to have spaceships attacking each other at a significant fraction of the speed of light, there is no time for humans to target the weapons (much less manually guiding torpedoes!); if you want gunners' skills to matter, you cannot have ships moving that fast.

Positives: Somewhere, under all this, there is a vein of escapist entertainment which kept me reading, and even led me to take a chance on the sequel. (It has fewer info-dumps but even more Mary-Sueishness.) I get the feeling that DePrima could be an entertaining writer, if he would just read some science fiction more recent that E. E. "Doc" Smith. show less