Stardoc

From LeoWiki

Stardoc			SL Viehl		Space Opera
6	8	6	7	7	6.8
Secularity	Technophilia	Quality	Xenophilia	Personal Tilt	Average

The protagonist of Stardoc, Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil, is supremely neurotic. A lot of the book is taken up by her repetitive worrying about the thoughts and actions of other characters. Some sulking is involved.

That raises the question of whether such portrayal of anxiety is rooted in Viehl, as a female, better understanding the female psyche than the male writers I habitually read or whether Viehl is just weird.:P

In the book, Dr. Cherijo discovers that her father is an Evil Fucker(TM), so she escapes to the frontier world of K2 where she defeats evildoers, humps tall and dark shaven-chested male aliens with long hair, and cures plagues with one glance of her burning eyes.

On the whole, Stardoc feels like an episode of Star Trek. The technology is about as plausible and the characterization is about as well done. Viehl knows her human anatomy technobabble, but does seem somewhat weak on actual biology and anthropology. Aliens are based purely on modern western civilization.

Stardoc is by no means a bad book, but neither is it a great one. I'd definitely recommend it over Dan Simmons' Rise of Endymion, but that's not saying much at all.

I am somewhat skeptical about Viehl's potential to develop as a writer. There's a sequel sitting on my self, but I'll read a few other things before I get to it.:D