Review:
Cascade Failure, by L.M. Sagas
| Series: |
Ambit's Run #1 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
2024 |
| ISBN: |
1-250-87126-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
407 |
Cascade Failure is a far-future science fiction adventure with a
small helping of cyberpunk vibes. It is the first of a (so far) two-book
series, and was the author's first novel.
The
Ambit is an old and small Guild ship, not much to look at, but
it holds a couple of surprises. One is its captain, Eoan, who is an AI
with a deep and insatiable curiosity that has driven them and their ship
farther and farther out into the Spiral. The other is its surprisingly
competent crew: a battle-scarred veteran named Saint who handles the
fighting, and a talented engineer named Nash who does literally everything
else. The novel opens with them taking on supplies at Aron Outpost. A
supposed Guild deserter named Jalsen wanders into the ship looking for
work.
An AI ship with a found-family crew is normally my catnip, so I wanted to
love this book. Alas, I did not.
There were parts I liked. Nash is great: snarky, competent, and direct.
Eoan is a bit distant and slightly more simplistic of a character than I
was expecting, but I appreciated the way Sagas put them firmly in charge
of the ship and departed from the conventional AI character presentation.
Once the plot starts in earnest (more on that in a moment), we meet Anke,
the computer hacker, whose charming anxiety reaction is a complete
inability to stop talking and who adds some needed depth to the character
interactions. There's plenty of action, a plot that makes at least some
sense, and a few moments that almost achieved the emotional payoff the
author was attempting.
Unfortunately, most of the story focuses on Saint and Jal, and both of
them are irritatingly dense cliches.
The moment Jal wanders onto the
Ambit in the first chapter, the
reader is informed that Jal, Saint, and Eoan have a history. The crew of
the Ambit spent a year looking for Jal and aren't letting go of him now
that they've found him. Jal, on the other hand, clearly blames Saint for
something and is not inclined to trust him. Okay, fine, a bit generic of a
setup but the writing moved right along and I was curious enough.
It then takes a full 180 pages before the reader finds out what the hell
is going on with Saint and Jal. Predictably, it's a stupid
misunderstanding that could have been cleared up with one conversation in
the second chapter.
Cascade Failure does not contain a romance (and to the extent that
it hints at one, it's a sapphic romance), but I swear Saint and Jal are
both the male protagonist from a certain type of stereotypical
heterosexual romance novel. They're both the brooding man with the past,
who is too hurt to trust anyone and assumes the worst because he's unable
to use his words or ask an open question and then listen to the answer.
The first half of this book is them being sullen at each other at great
length while both of them feel miserable. Jal keeps doing weird and
suspicious things to resolve a problem that would have been far more
easily resolved by the rest of the crew if he would offer any explanation
at all. It's not even suspenseful; we've read about this character enough
times to know that he'll turn out to have a heart of gold and everything
will be a misunderstanding. I found it tedious. Maybe people who like slow
burn romances with this character type will have a less negative reaction.
The real plot starts at about the time Saint and Jal finally get their
shit sorted out. It turns out to have almost nothing to do with either of
them. The environmental control systems of worlds are suddenly failing
(hence the book title), and Anke, the late-arriving computer programmer
and terraforming specialist, has a rather wild theory about what's
happening. This leads to a lot of action, some decent twists, and a plot
that felt very cyberpunk to me, although unfortunately it culminates in an
absurdly-cliched action climax.
This book is an action movie that desperately wants to make you feel all
the feels, and it worked about as well as that typically works in action
movies for me. Jaded cynicism and an inability to communicate are not the
ways to get me to have an emotional reaction to a book, and Jal (once he
finally starts talking) is so ridiculously earnest that it's like reading
the adventures of a Labrador puppy. There was enough going on that it kept
me reading, but not enough for the story to feel satisfying. I needed a
twist, some depth, way more Nash and Anke and way less of the men,
something.
Everyone is going to compare this book to
Firefly, but
Firefly had better banter, created more complex character
interactions due to the larger and more varied crew, and played the
cynical mercenary for laughs instead of straight, all of which suited me
better. This is not a bad book, particularly once it gets past the halfway
point, but it's not that memorable either, at least for me. If you're
looking for a space adventure with heavy action hero and military SF vibes
that wants to be about Big Feelings but gets there in mostly obvious ways,
you could do worse. If you're looking for a found-family starship crew
story more like Becky Chambers, I think you'll find this one a bit too
shallow and obvious.
Not really recommended, although there's nothing that wrong with it and
I'm sure other people's experience will differ.
Followed by
Gravity Lost, which I'm unlikely to read.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Version 0.3.16 of the Rblpapi package arrived on CRAN today. Rblpapi provides a direct
interface between R and the Bloomberg
Terminal via the C++
API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license
and installation is required).
This is the sixteenth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. It contains several
enhancements. Two contributed PRs improve an error message, and extended
connection options. We cleaned up a bit of internal code. And this
release also makes the build conditional on having a valid build
environment. This has been driven by the fact CRAN continues to builder under
macOS 13 for x86_64, but Bloomberg no longer supplies a library and
headers. And our repeated requests to be able to opt out of the build
were, well, roundly ignored. So now the builds will succeed, but on
unviable platforms such as that one we will only offer empty
functions. But no more build ERRORS yelling at us for three
configurations.
The detailed list of changes follow below.
A new release 0.1.8 of 
A second maintenance release of our still young-ish package 
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by 
The twentysecond release of 
I am told, by friends who have spent time at Google, about the reason