Look Out for Space (New Sam Space Extravaganza)

Rating:
Summary: Look Out For Space
Review: This quick, breezy follow up to Nolan's Edgar-nominated mystery/sf spoof/hybrid Space For Hire will not disappoint fans of the first book. But, it is not quite as fun.

The plot was totally unpredictable in the first book, and less contrived. Something clever and imaginative always led to something that topped it, way back in Sam Space's raunchy debut. Here, Space's early line of inquiry falls into a rather routine scenario involving questioning a line-up of potential asteroid stealers. But slowly the plot jerks itself out of this rut, and later, after various encounters with assorted scary monsters and scantily clad alien females (some of whom find Earthmen distinctly lacking in appendages), Sam ends up on a hellish planet facing a life of hard-labour. To avoid this, he volunteers for scientific research that most of the prisoners around him say is worse than a lifetime of back-breaking toil.

Once Sam gets experimented on, the novel recaptures some of the first novel's old glory, with some clever plot twists, and the return of an old character. And, thankfully, the mystery content is strong at the finale, as villains stand revealed, and it becomes clear that some of the more routine bits from earlier in the book were at least helping satisfy the whodunit angle.

The humour is still unabashedly sexist at times, or just plain silly, or occasionally brilliant (the last line of the book perhaps being the most amusing in a crude kind of way), and it was quick joy following Sam Space around as he tried to locate missing asteroids, worms, and insects.