Book Review: The Sten Series
The Sten Series
Author: Chris Bunch and Allan Cole
Books Eight
First publish date: 1986-1993
Hard Core Scale Average: 1.7
Recommend: The series as a whole no. Books 3-5 are bit enjoyable as military espionage science fiction with some nice combat and space battles.
About: Sten is born in an industrial hellhole and destined to die. Events lead to him working for the Eternal Emperor which controls all FTL. Caught up in espionage, wars, and politics of the empire what will become of him and the empire at large.
Review: A mostly poorly written and plotted series filled with time waste. Some things are fun. The technology when the author's slip and become modern technology minded to relate too closely to a modern audience is the fun kind of world structure. Aliens when they show up are frumpy, varied, and captivating. Again, space battles are very well written and fun. Sometimes there are great ground battles. Individual fighting scenes can often be weak due to the characters involved rarely ever being in danger. This is a severe weakness of the series. There is little sense of danger. The characters usually better trained and handed then what they encounter.
The book series starts poorly written, but the writer's find common ground and pace and develop by book 3. Always the question of what writer's are doing what. They do improve though. Early books filled with tons of telling and pointless short snippets or weird cut short chapters that could have been page breaks. Luckily as time goes on this shortens greatly. Later books though beginning to waste early chapter's for rehearsals instead of letting things come naturally. Book 5 does spend huge pages telling prison things the audience can well understand without.
A large issue is the author's claimed they wrote this because they were tired of monarchies being used in science fiction. However, as they shape the emperor and empire it sort of counter acts the point by having the shoe drop too late instead of early on. Quality declines in book 6 where nothing happens. The character's agency avails nothing, wasting audience's time. It is the weakest book in the series. The whole book "The Return of the Emperor" is just that, the title. Nothing happens in it. The plot auto resolves as that title. Nothing else in it matters besides a side character's quest the hints to things in the final book and by a far far stretch becomes some how a life line deus ex for a character to move the plot a long. The later books become puzzling in a bad way, cartoonishly evil written characters shatter the tone in stupidity.
It is often an issue when supposed intelligent character's act stupid. Another i
ssue is female character's often exist to be a love interest and no more. Many characters often forgot about. Despite science fiction, lingering stereotypes such as the Roma exist. What I do respect is early and positive LTBGQ character's exist, at least one pair in every book. An interesting choice for the times.
The pointless disappearance of a character in book 2 was rather frustrating. Alex Kilgour's unreadable accented dialogue also painful, hurting his point as supposed comic relief.
As the series winds down with book 6 it begins to lose steam. The author's plot movements to express their point a poor contrast done by their earlier ground work.
Book 7 a odd dock of failure that makes little sense. Book 8 filled with filler instead of the agency. Things begin to show snippets and character's talk of plans instead of executing plot. Everything ends in a quick rising action to a easy to guess conflict and a poor resolution to care about. The author's failed to make audience care about a universe and character's due to the base archetype that they were written.
Overall, a sf series to skip besides maybe book 3-5 if you have a itch and nothing to fill it with.
