Review: The Maze of Ortygia: A Disappearance at Hecate Station

The Maze of Ortygia: A Disappearance at Hecate Station by Robert Hildenbrand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The most obvious problem with this one is that the dialog is so stilted, with very few contractions, and all the characters sound the same.

The lesser but still important problems include the fact that the author frequently tells us how a character is instead of showing us, and that a lot of important information seems to stay in the author's head and never make it to the page, or only make it there suddenly and with no preparation. For example, a character who has seemed up to that point to be human is abruptly announced to be a human-shaped cyborg (most cyborgs in this setting aren't human-shaped). This isn't something the other characters discover; it's just narrated.

There's a might-as-well-be-magical stuff called "ether," with abilities that are not at all defined to begin with (so it's not Sandersonian). We're just told it's useful, not how or why. Later on, it can apparently form complex illusory scenes, and convert other matter into itself (so it seems to be programmable matter, maybe). Conveniently, when a lot of it rushes out of a confined space, it only pushes named characters around a bit (and the one it bounces off the wall is enhanced to take it), but it kills an unspecified number of unnamed characters by tearing their ship apart and converting parts of the ship into more of itself, at just the point where its pressure ought to drop. It even luckily prevents a named character from being hit by laser fire at the same time. It might as well be called "makesnodamnsensium" or "plotconveniencium."

FTL isn't a thing, and we're told that backup will take an infeasibly long time to reach the system, but then we're also told in a different context that backup can be called and will arrive "soon". Ships can't operate without their transponders, but a number of duplicate ships are swapping around the same transponder, and radar doesn't seem to be picking up the discrepancy.

Add to this that the author doesn't always type the word he means ("forward" instead of "future," "would" instead of "wouldn't"), and often doesn't use the past perfect tense to position events comprehensibly in time relative to the narrative moment. In fact, it starts out in present tense for a short time, and then drops suddenly into past. There are missing commas around terms of address, fumbled idioms, and a plural conveyed by using an apostrophe after the "s". These problems aren't particularly frequent, and I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so some of the more egregious errors might be corrected by publication - or they might not.

I got about halfway through and wasn't much gripped by the several mysteries, particularly since I suspected they would be solved by the use of plotconveniencium, so I started reading something else to see if I cared enough to come back to this. I concluded that I didn't.

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