peteg's blog - noise - books - 2020 10 20 JohnBrunner InterstellarEmpire

John Brunner: Interstellar Empire.

Tue, Oct 20, 2020./noise/books | Link

Kindle. Once more unto the breach of thin Brunner. Swords and starships, the latter being entirely irrelevant and the former only mostly. What makes him worth reading — his insight into social structure — is almost entirely absent here. Moreover, as he admits in a foreword, all three are derived from Asimov, right down to a robot advising an emperor. His foundational conceit, that humans don't invent interstellar spaceflight but discover massive caches of alien ships, goes completely undeveloped. Objectively a total bust.