J.J. Green

I am really sorry I have to give this such a bad rating because it clearly seems like it is a passion project, but the author just didn't have the skills to pull any of it off.
The dialogue is wooden and stilted. There is very little logical consistency or just basic logic in general. The problems reach from telling someone a crucial secret and only afterward asking for a promise not to reveal it (which is not just a formality in this case), to reinforcements running, guns blazing, along a corridor towards their captured teammates who are in the process of freeing themselves. Friendly fire, anyone? This is just one of many examples of these supposedly hardened mercenaries doing things only a bloody amateur would do, and miraculously getting away with it.
There are just countless examples of situations that show clearly that the author didn't think about them critically. Furthermore, in many cases, the author just didn't do enough research, if any at all.
The driving motivation seems to have been to orchestrate cool action movie scenes, not create a coherent narrative.
And here I am sorry again because this didn't come across to me as laziness but just as ignorance and more importantly unawareness of said ignorance.
The world-building is shallow and naive and so are the characters. The book fails to explain many crucial details necessary for a lot of circumstances to make any sense but spends quite a bit of time on unnecessary details. It's not that there is far too much detail but that the priorities are just so backward in what the reader is being told. (And this is assuming that the reader is just missing information and not that these things really just don't make any sense.)
There is one word that describes this book very well. Amateurish. And I don't mean this as an insult.
It reads as if it was written by someone with very little idea of how to write a proper story let alone build a grand sci-fi setting.… (more)