I’ve lamented before that a reading experience is pretty strongly subject to what is going on in a person’s life. I hold by that. I try to tailor my reading to my mood. When something like this turns up on my list, it is because I am already pretty stressed. I needed a cheap and easy unwind (which is also how I am burning through the whole A Song of Ice and Fire with such rapidity). Were I actually doing better, I would be reading better. So that’s the big warning before the review. I wasn’t exactly in a good head space when I tackled this.
Nor have I been deeply looking into these books. Frankly, if I uttered the words ‘I am going to do some light reading, but before that let me spend a few days researching Harry Harrison’, people would have every right to be concerned about me. I picked this up not wanting to do any research. I wanted to get away.
I guess I did. The sort of standard hero story plot of the second installment of this series was about what I expected. Somehow, a planet has figured out how to make interstellar war economically viable (which I didn’t really know was a sci-fi problem but, yea I guess that tracks) and it is once again up to a now married Stainless Steel Rat. Married? Yup, to the antagonist of the previous book. How? Shut up and don’t ask me, that’s how. The Stainless Steel Rat goes undercover on the planet, infiltrates the military, learns the secret, etc. So yea, it checked the escapism check box.
Now I need to get to the ‘I don’t get it’ part of my review. Older books are providing more and more of a challenge for me in terms of reading it in the right context. Golden Age sci-fi is riddled with Golden Age sexism, and it was my understanding that the previous book was lampooning that. I guess that was in this one too, but it felt… I don’t know. Less well crafted. <Spoiler>The rat’s wife botches the job at the end of the story and the Rat ends up saving the day </Spoiler> and I guess I just didn’t see what the ironic twist on this was meant to be.
I am still going to read the next one, so I will give this a pass. But in the mean time, I have other things ready to fuel my escapism.
Failures in Polymathy 