Starfishers (Starfishers #2) 3Stars

 

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Title: Starfishers
Series: Starfishers #2
Author: Glen Cook
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 211
Words: 72K

The boy narrator from the previous book is now just one of two undercover agents for Luna Command, the military machine of humanity. They have infiltrated a Starfisher world ship to discover its secrets for all of humanity. The Sangaree, the humanoid aliens also from the previous book, have also sent their own undercover agent. She ends up outing BenRabi and Mouse but they for some inexplicable reason don’t out her. This allows her to get a Sangaree Clan fleet to attack the world ship and then there’s some space sharks (I’m not kidding) and there’s big battles, blah, blah, blah.

The whole time BenRabi has been having an existential crisis and he’s as whiny as a 15 year old. It gets real old real fast. I wanted to slap him across the face so many times and tell him to grow up and stop being such a baby. Why Cook chose to write him this way is beyond me.

In the end BenRabi chooses to abandon Luna Command and join in with the Starfishers. Which is what they also wanted. However, Mouse is Luna Commands long term bullyboy BenRabi going over was all part of his plan. Aye yi yi.

This wasn’t a waste of my time and I actually enjoyed this a tiny bit more than the first book, but my goodness, BenRabi made it very hard to enjoy the story. It almost seems like Cook is deliberately writing his SF to be as unpalatable as possible. Why, I have zero idea. Maybe Cook has a split personality and the side that wrote SF hated everybody, but especially the people who read his SF? OR! Cook didn’t actually write his SF. He subcontracted it out to guy named Vladimir Gonzalez from China who only wrote in Bavarian and then used a corgi to re-translate it into english. Hey, that works for me! It neatly explains everything.

The REAL Glen Cook

★★★☆☆

From the Publisher

Starfish: Treasure troves of power. They were creatures of fusion energy, ancient, huge, intelligent, drifting in herds on the edge of the galaxy, producing their ambergris, the substance precious to man and the man-like Sangaree alike. In deep, starless space the herds were protected by the great harvestships of the Seiners, or Starfishers - the independent, non-Confederation people who dared to skirt the deadly boundaries of Stars' End and battle the Sangaree. It is with them on the harvestship Danion that Confederation agents Mouse Storm and Moyshe BenRabi have to fly and fight, probing mystery and myth. And where BenRabi, man of many names, must surrender his dreams and his mind itself to the golden dragons of space and their shepherds, the gathering... Starfishers.