Treasure Planet

This review is from: Treasure Planet (Man-Kzin Wars Series offshoot Book 2) (Kindle Edition)

This book is purportedly a standalone contribution to the Man-Kzin Wars series that I have been following ever since the first one came out, and I was looking forward to it given the high quality of every other one I had read.

Well, that was a few dollars and a few hours wasted, then!

There are a number of things wrong with the book, and only a very few things right.

The first and most glaring fault is that it reads like a bastard offspring of RL Stevenson's Treasure Island and a Poul Anderson rip-off: Kzin talking like Old Earth pirates, really?? Right down to oo ar matey and shiver my timbers, almost, AND characters like Long John Silver transplanted lock, stock and pegleg into Niven's Known Space Universe.

Another uncomfortable aspect was the almost random mixture of technologies throughout the book: cutlasses and blasters, high-end self-powering teaching nanotech and having to run around on foot?? No cell-type phones for Wunderlanders, while Kzin seemed to have them, which necessitated people riding around on horses to call for help???

The plot also had holes big enough enough to run an adult kzin through. About the least bad was crew selection, which of course necessitated a flimsy excuse for hiring just a bout a whole pirate crew - no background checks in Known Space, guys?? And seriously, a tech hoard find like the one described - with transfer discs a la puppeteers - wouldn't have made an impact in the Known Space timeline as we know it?

The ONLY saving grace in what is effectively a badly-written kids' book was the description of the library hardware and training software, and the construction of the alien written language - and that was incongruous when laid up against the juvenility of the rest of it. That's some money and some time I'll never get back.