Admiral (Sean Danker)

Admiral
The Admiral series, Book 1
Sean Danker
Roc
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The moment he wakes on the floor of a derelict spacecraft, surrounded by strangers in Evagardian military uniforms, he knows something has gone terribly wrong... especially when he is informed that he was pulled from a malfunctioning sleeper pod that designated him as an admiral. He is nothing of the sort - and what he really is hardly seems to matter anyway. His three rescuers, green cadets every one, don't belong on this vessel any more than he does; they were en route to assignment on the flagship of the empire, and have no idea how they ended up on this run-down old junker of a freighter. Worse, it seems that something has gone terribly wrong: the power is gone, the engines are dead, the gravity feels strange, and nobody answers the comms. The "Admiral" and his companions of circumstance may not trust one another, but they'll have to band together to figure out what happened if they are to have any hope of surviving, let alone escaping.

REVIEW: Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a straightforward story, so this one, from the description, seemed right up that alley: a small isolated crew facing a mysterious threat, the book equivalent of a popcorn space thriller flick in the vein of numerous Alien knock-offs, which even if it can't come close to the inspiration can at least entertain. But this thriller just does not deliver, playing out less like Alien and more like one of those video games where it takes too long to get to the meat of the action and game play becomes repetitious as threats basically recycle and scale up endlessly.
The main character, who never gets a name, wakes to confusion and an imminent threat. It immediately gave me vibes of SyFy's space adventure series Dark Matter (another victim of the channel's infamously overzealous axe before it could conclude its arc, curse them), making me wonder/hope about whether his memories might be similarly compromised... but, no. Everyone else knows who they are, even if they don't know why they're here, and it's the Admiral who, despite narrating the entire story, is playing games with the reader by deliberately omitting his own past and identity. This little dance routine, perpetually teasing but never revealing like an obnoxious kid playing keep-away on the playground, grows tiresome very fast, even when the author tries to distract by throwing everyone into danger from the start. Forced to overcome their mutual distrust for the sake of mutual survival, the four begin exploring, finding few answers but innumerable new problems, with little to no down time to process each development. The near-constant stress and adrenaline rush also grows tiresome, not helped by characters that feel like stock-bin archetypes (including one who, naturally, starts to fall for the theoretically charming and likely dangerous Admiral, because of course). As for the dangers, there's only so much running around on a derelict ship from one crisis to another, then across a desolate alien landscape doing the same, that can occur before reader burnout sets in, particularly when I started growing indifferent at best to the characters whose survival was on the line. None of this was helped by Danker's efforts to shoehorn in galactic history and politics (which was hindered rather than helped by the Admiral's continued smug refusal to let the reader know who the heck he was) around the edges of the endless dangers piling up on the crew's backs. Eventually, the real face of the danger is revealed (not a huge surprise, really), but even that loses its shock value when it becomes just more and more of the same basic threat, eventually inflated to just plain unbelievable degrees. Then it ends in a way that made much of the effort that went into character building feel pointless, though it does finally answer some questions about the Admiral... even if by then I'd long since stopped caring.
In its favor, the story does not drag its feet (even if it's sometimes running itself in circles), and it more or less delivers exactly what it promises, a sci-fi thriller with nonstop action and "mystery" (if in that subset of the genre where the actual nature of said "mystery" is just a thin veneer of the usual Big Scary Threat in the Dark material where specifics don't really matter so long as there's sufficient action involved in evading death). I just never felt engaged by it, not even in a popcorn-flick way.

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