Book Review: The Third Eagle by R. A. MacAvoy
Three Stars
“Ten years climbing a ladder to find nothing at the top.”
A young man who lives in a niche of a niche culture, chucks all aside one day and leaves: leaves his job, his home, his planet. Unprepared? Does being a galaxy-class martial arts expert count? Some.
“Hearing his death described as inevitable moved Wanbli not a whit. Everyone’s death was inevitable.”
Excellent sense of otherness. Language drift, Wacaan culture, day flower species. Then the earthies show up.
“An excellent translation of what [the stars] would look like if massless directionality were more adaptable to human experience.”
Good understanding and representation of the science of living in space. Though written in 1989, story has not gone stale–let alone rotten–by the rush of technology since.
“A lot of something that’s already out in space is better than a lot of something that needs to be lifted.”
Quibbles: On the third page he looks at himself in a mirror. Trite. More seriously, idiosyncratic paragraphing makes it hard to follow who is talking, think, acting.
“It has cost me a great deal to run nowhere as long as I have,”
As a Matter of Fancy 