The Daedalus Incident

The Daedalus Incident by Michael J Martinez is attempting to be innovative by blending traditional space romance with hard science fiction, space opera and alternate history. And in this ambition, the seeds of destruction lie. Let’s start with a simple truth. There are so many books already published it’s almost impossible to come up with ideas that have not been dealt with at length. In choosing to have eighteenth century galleons powered between planets by alchemy, we are rerunning Philip Reeve’s Larklight series filtered through David Weber’s Honor Harrington series and David Drake’s RCN series, all following in the same tradition as Bob Shaw who had ragged astronauts in wooden spaceships in the Land and Overland Trilogy.

If you’re going to develop well-established tropes, you should do it with wit and verve. Sadly this is humorless. As to the hard science element, we have a future mining operation on Mars which suddenly develops inexplicable problems. When the two plots collide, another tired old trope emerges. It’s not that this is badly written. But unless you have never read novels channeling Patrick O’Brian in outer space, this is not for you.