{"id":5850,"date":"2014-06-09T11:04:35","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T15:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5850"},"modified":"2014-06-09T11:04:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T15:04:35","slug":"review-trial-by-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5850","title":{"rendered":"Review: Trial By Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><cite>Trial By Fire<\/cite> (Charles E. Gannon, Baen) is the sort of book that divides those who notice it into two parts.  One group will sneer &#8220;Yard goods from Baen, yet another space opera full of stuff blowing up&#8221;; the other will nod and smile and say &#8220;Good clean fun, I&#8217;ll take it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m cheerfully in the second group, myself.  But I do have standards.  Done badly, this sort of thing is just boring and derivative button-pushing, a sort of male-targeted analog of formula romances.  Done well, it&#8217;s a fun ride with enough elements of puzzle story and sense of wonder to make it respectable SF even if it doesn&#8217;t aspire to the heights of conceptual breakthrough found in the best of the genre.<\/p>\n<p>This particular book is the second in a sequence that I would describe as enjoyable if unexceptional. Much of the furniture is familiar (one of the major alien species is perhaps too much like Alan Dean Foster&#8217;s Thranx, and another is fairly generic <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/ProudWarriorRaceGuy\">Proud Warrior Race Guys<\/a>) but the author knows his way around the battles and action scenes, and some of the reveals in the puzzle side of the plot are genuinely interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, the author earns his money.  You&#8217;ll want to read the first book, <cite>Fire With Fire<\/cite>, before this one.  Expect sequels &#8211; but if you&#8217;re in the target market for this book, you already know you want them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trial By Fire (Charles E. Gannon, Baen) is the sort of book that divides those who notice it into two parts. One group will sneer &#8220;Yard goods from Baen, yet another space opera full of stuff blowing up&#8221;; the other will nod and smile and say &#8220;Good clean fun, I&#8217;ll take it.&#8221; I&#8217;m cheerfully in&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5850\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Review: Trial By Fire<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5850"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5851,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions\/5851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}