Book Review: Greenstar Season One

as per Amazon review 4 out of 5 Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book. Comedy be hard. Even the best writers can be a hit and miss. I would not be a regular reader of either sci-fi or humour books, so this review is probably more relevant to other people who would not be fans of the genre. A lot of the Star Trek and Buck Rogers stuff probably passed me by. It reminded me of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books and also of the first Hal Space Jock, which would be the total of the humorous sci-fi books I have read. I could add the Discworld novels, but as they are more fantasy and a different brand of humour, and somewhat more sophisticated, I don't think there is any comparison there. I give this four out of five, marks for effort and I read to the end and I enjoyed it mostly and would be interested in trying another book by the authors, or books by either of the authors. Episode one – slow start to the first chapter, it was fairly dead-pan and I was wondering where the humour was going to come from. It picked up in the second chapter, and continued to get better, I did actually laugh several times before the end of the episode. I particularly liked Topik the AI, who is a darker version of Marvin in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Overall I found the humour is similar. One of the episodes wandered off into the weeds, the whole episode was about a simulation of along the lines of the holo-deck in Star Trek the Next Generation (I loathed the holo-deck in STNG, so you can tell I wasn't thrilled by this). It had very little humour or relevance although it did show the authors capable of writing straight action, and maybe foreshadowed skills used by the characters in a climactic battle later on. The culmination at the end was quite straight and exciting as well, with just an ironic joke at the very end. Again, I'm sure I missed a lot of the jokes, there were some references to famous authors and sci-fi characters that I picked up but you probably have to be steeped in the culture to get the most out of those jokes.