Rating: 
Summary: FAILS TO CAPITALIZE ON GOOD BEGINNING
Review: The premise behind ORBITAL BURN, a down on her luck private investigator helping a talking dog find a manufactured kid. Well it sounded good at the beginning and even started out fairly well. Unfortunately it went down hill pretty quickly. Like I said the premise had potential and the characters could have been a gold mine, but that wasn't to be. In fact the plot meandered all over the place with little coherent direction and the characters remained flat and uninteresting. The ending was, well the best thing I can say about it is that it wasn't predictable. Of course it wasn't predictable because it seemed to have so little relationship to the storyline. It was also anticlimactic and a bit forced. To damn with faint praise I'd say good try, better luck next time. NOT RECOMMENDED
Rating:
Summary: FAILS TO CAPITALIZE ON GOOD BEGINNING
Review: The premise behind ORBITAL BURN, a down on her luck private investigator helping a talking dog find a manufactured kid. Well it sounded good at the beginning and even started out fairly well. Unfortunately it went down hill pretty quickly. Like I said the premise had potential and the characters could have been a gold mine, but that wasn't to be. In fact the plot meandered all over the place with little coherent direction and the characters remained flat and uninteresting. The ending was, well the best thing I can say about it is that it wasn't predictable. Of course it wasn't predictable because it seemed to have so little relationship to the storyline. It was also anticlimactic and a bit forced. To damn with faint praise I'd say good try, better luck next time. NOT RECOMMENDED
Rating: 
Summary: Orbital Burn- 2003 Australian SF Award Nominee
Review: This book is like a cross between some serious science-fiction and vintage detective noir stories. The characters are the driving force in this story, with Dog as the most loveable creature-machine ever to exist, and the barely-held together, clinically-dead private eye, Lou, is equally compelling. Put in a bit of mystery and some inventive scienctific ideas, and you have a literary winner. And I'm not the only one to think so, Orbital Burn was nominated for Australia's 2003 SF (Ditmar) Award.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Debut
Review: This is a very good story full of neat SF ideas and some involving characters combined with an interesting plot. A very good first novel that shows this author has great promise. Lou the unlicensed PI whose main problem is that she is technically dead and living on a planet that's about to be obliterated by an approaching rock the size of Mars is well drawn and likeable, Dog the augmented pooch she takes on as her client is also a great idea and a companion you feel a bond with. The combination of high tech future world and old fashioned detective story is pretty well done and gets the reader in. The second half of the story is more iffy however, too many convenient aliens and AIs with super powers and not enough explanation towards the end. I feel Lou should have struggled along more on her own on Kestrel to solve the case instead of action transferring to the orbital colony (though the courtroom stuff was quite entertaining). The mysterious woman (and later male) visitors from the future are never really explained properly and could really have been omitted with no loss. Right at the end why the extra-dimensional aliens can't cure Lou is not explained (heck, they can do so many other amazing god-like things!) The Kid's background is never really explained either, why is he the chosen one to bridge with the aliens, etc.? Still, these are relatively minor gripes with an otherwise good story. 4 stars as it's a first novel, if it wasn't I'd probably say 3 or 3 1/2.
Rating:
Summary: It's All There
Review: What're you looking for in a book? Do you want techno-talk with micro-widgets? Perhaps some dark and shadowy places with tense, quick walks from here to there? Violence? Walking dead? Really big guns? Dirty cops? Elevators that go from the planet's surface to space and beyond? Slimeball ex-spouses talking pretty for some untold reason? I could go one forever, but there's a word limit to this thing. The point I'm making is that ORBITAL BURN truly can be something to all people and everything to some people. Let's melt that down and call it "most things to many people". Alright? Enough reviews introduce the characters and the story...I'll not belabor any past sketches too much. In short - on a distant planet, one doomed from a dire intersection with a major space rock, a dead girl made mostly good with nanotechnological thingamabobbies studies the finer points of playing the broke, hungry (metaphorically speaking), and unemployed private investigator. She gets a gig from a dog, also technologically enhanced and smart as all get-out, who a) can't pay (a hard-boiled standard), and b) is looking for a disposable human so brainless that the dog walks him like a marionette without strings (this one's a bit less common). As they search they run across the usual street thugs, the previously-mentioned slimy ex-husband, and dirty cops...and things don't get better from there. Will the PI (her name is Lou) help the dog (whose name is Dog) find the missing kid? Before the big rock hits? Before she dies...again? Tension!! Where the story is great, the characters are one tick behind. Some, such as Lou the dead PI, are quite mature. Some minor characters are as developed as they need be, such as Lou's ex-husband. Other's could use some fleshing out. It's a minor nit, really, but since characterization carries so many novels these days it's a wit worth bringing up. Robots, partial peap;we, and people with robotic parts would be included here for further consideration. Mr. Bedford puts most of his effort into Lou, so she makes for a deep and empathetic character. You learn to almost hate her ex-husband. Some others might have benefited from more backing, but then when one writes one has to judge just how much the reader needs to know and how much they should figure out on their own. I would, and do, emphatically recommended ORBITAL BURN to readers of science fiction. The only reason I'm not tossing 5 big stars is that I'm generally not a science fiction reader. I'm a horror reader who found dark bits hidden throughout ORBITAL BURN that kept me turning pages. Now you buy it and go find your bits, eh? -Mikey- Michael T. Huyck, Jr.
http://www.nukegumby.com
Rating:
Summary: It's All There
Review: What're you looking for in a book? Do you want techno-talk with micro-widgets? Perhaps some dark and shadowy places with tense, quick walks from here to there? Violence? Walking dead? Really big guns? Dirty cops? Elevators that go from the planet's surface to space and beyond? Slimeball ex-spouses talking pretty for some untold reason? I could go one forever, but there's a word limit to this thing. The point I'm making is that ORBITAL BURN truly can be something to all people and everything to some people. Let's melt that down and call it "most things to many people". Alright? Enough reviews introduce the characters and the story...I'll not belabor any past sketches too much. In short - on a distant planet, one doomed from a dire intersection with a major space rock, a dead girl made mostly good with nanotechnological thingamabobbies studies the finer points of playing the broke, hungry (metaphorically speaking), and unemployed private investigator. She gets a gig from a dog, also technologically enhanced and smart as all get-out, who a) can't pay (a hard-boiled standard), and b) is looking for a disposable human so brainless that the dog walks him like a marionette without strings (this one's a bit less common). As they search they run across the usual street thugs, the previously-mentioned slimy ex-husband, and dirty cops...and things don't get better from there. Will the PI (her name is Lou) help the dog (whose name is Dog) find the missing kid? Before the big rock hits? Before she dies...again? Tension!! Where the story is great, the characters are one tick behind. Some, such as Lou the dead PI, are quite mature. Some minor characters are as developed as they need be, such as Lou's ex-husband. Other's could use some fleshing out. It's a minor nit, really, but since characterization carries so many novels these days it's a wit worth bringing up. Robots, partial peap;we, and people with robotic parts would be included here for further consideration. Mr. Bedford puts most of his effort into Lou, so she makes for a deep and empathetic character. You learn to almost hate her ex-husband. Some others might have benefited from more backing, but then when one writes one has to judge just how much the reader needs to know and how much they should figure out on their own. I would, and do, emphatically recommended ORBITAL BURN to readers of science fiction. The only reason I'm not tossing 5 big stars is that I'm generally not a science fiction reader. I'm a horror reader who found dark bits hidden throughout ORBITAL BURN that kept me turning pages. Now you buy it and go find your bits, eh? -Mikey- Michael T. Huyck, Jr.
http://www.nukegumby.com
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