Review: Endurance: The Complete Series

Endurance: The Complete Series by A.C. Spahn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First, the praise. For me, this was a better-written and funnier space opera than the Hugo-winning Red Shirts by John Scalzi. The characters are more distinct and better developed, the plot makes more sense, and the description is far superior.

Now, the undermining of the praise. I thought Red Shirts was mediocre and not at all funny, and didn't think it remotely deserved its Hugo. The characters in that book were indistinguishable, not least because they (and their environment) are never described at all, and there was a huge, ridiculous plot hole. You could film it quite easily; just cut out a few identical, vaguely human shapes from thin cardboard, write random names on them, move them round a white room on obvious wires, and have Scalzi do the voice. (Not voices; there's only one, and it's Scalzi's.) That would give exactly my experience of reading Red Shirts, if you made a few careless editing errors and tried to be arty at the end, but failed.

So actually, Endurance didn't set my world on fire. It made it to four stars, barely, because the characters are likeable, and they develop some individuality and have arcs. They're not the most complex or fully rounded characters you'll ever meet, though; they each only have a couple of characteristics, even when we've been in their viewpoint for a while, and their backstory tends to be vaguely hinted at rather than developed.

The book is made up of multiple stories with the same characters and setting, but tending to focus on one or two characters per story, moving around the crew of the spaceship after which the book is named. There's an overall story arc, though, which makes it like a limited TV miniseries rather than a movie; each episode has its own complete story, but together they make a larger story.

That more or less worked for me. I'm not sure of the timespan over which the stories were written, but there are inconsistencies between them, from the spelling of the talky/talkie box to whether or not there is a substantial United Earth military apart from the law enforcement organization to which the central characters belong.

The setting is heavy on the tropes and light on actual science, which is kind of what I've come to expect from space opera. However, I found the balance a bit too much on the tropey side and away from the science side. Not only do we have a crew of misfits in an outdated ship (who turn out to be the greatest ever and save the day repeatedly), but we have several sets of planet-of-hats aliens closely resembling humans (physically and culturally) except for a couple of minor characteristics; a genius engineer capable of single-handedly inventing FTL travel and understanding alien technology quite easily; and a science crew who can figure out a cure in a very short time for an alien disease that the aliens haven't got a cure for, even though none of the crew are medical scientists and the aliens have been specifically mentioned to have medical science far in advance of humans'. Oh, and zombies, which made no sense whatsoever.

The copy editing was good; I only noticed four or five minor glitches, which is far fewer than average. That helped to keep me reading, even though I found the plot predictable (when it wasn't nonsensical) and less than fully engaging. It was mildly amusing, mostly because of the crew's banter.

I didn't love it. I wouldn't run out and buy another one. But I thought it was better than Scalzi.

View all my reviews