{"id":5956,"date":"2014-06-23T00:29:43","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T04:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5956"},"modified":"2014-06-23T17:04:19","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T21:04:19","slug":"review-unexpected-alliances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5956","title":{"rendered":"Review: Unexpected Alliances"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><cite>Unexpected Alliances<\/cite> (M.R. LaScola; Two Harbors Press) is, alas, a horrible example of why the absence of editorial gatekeepers in indie publishing can be a bad thing.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a clue: if you see nothing wrong with a near-future first-contact scene in which the commander of an armada of 30,000 starships many light years from Earth introduces herself as Nancy Hartley from the planet Ultron, you shouldn&#8217;t be writing SF.<\/p>\n<p>The relatively short portion of the book I managed to read before I gave up also featured talking dragons and 7-foot-tall nonhuman aliens who casually interbreed with humans. The prose reads like something a bright 9-year-old might write.  It&#8217;s a sort of pile of glittery SF and fantasy fripperies quoted with absolutely no regard to whether they make any sense, or even any sense that they <em>ought<\/em> to make sense.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a brave new world.  Anyone can publish.  Sometimes they shouldn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unexpected Alliances (M.R. LaScola; Two Harbors Press) is, alas, a horrible example of why the absence of editorial gatekeepers in indie publishing can be a bad thing. Here&#8217;s a clue: if you see nothing wrong with a near-future first-contact scene in which the commander of an armada of 30,000 starships many light years from Earth&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5956\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Review: Unexpected Alliances<\/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-5956","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\/5956","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=5956"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5969,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956\/revisions\/5969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}