Mindspace by Mel Keegan
Title: Mindspace 
Author: Mel Keegan
Type: Male Slash, Science Fiction, Action, Adventure, Romance, Drama
Length: 248
Rating: Good
Blurb: On the far frontier, life is tough when you're a transspace pilot stripped of your license to fly. The good jobs go to graduate guildsmen who make the professional grade ... and who play by the guild's rulebook. Jack DiFalco broke the rules. Busted, he found himself on the wrong side of the law and the rough side of the guild -- and his crime was mindspacing ... playing one of the incredible high-tech games which are changing the future of humanity.
Playing not in VR, but in the gamespace, the total-immersion rigs where players enters the realm of the machine. And some of them don't make it back out. Kieron Charig is a transspace navigator. He went through guild school with Jack, but unlike Jack he has no patience for the game, or for gamers. Mindspacing is the major tool of the navigator's trade - the big transspace ships are flown via a symbiotic relationship where the mind/machine interface is dangerously blurry. Kieron works there; he scorns to play there -- and like all transspace flightcrews he fears the consequences.
The irony is that it's Kieron, not Jack, who will pay the ultimate price, while Jack is plucked out of a rough, dirty underworld and propelled into places more opulent than the games he has played. But success comes with strings attached, and at a high price. Jack will pay his dues with skill, courage and even sex. For Kieron Charig, no price is high enough, and every moment is a battle to preserve what remains of his humanity. Everything they are, everything they might be, pivots on Max Gorodin -- who stands at the helm of the aerospace giant, Jabalpur Indistries. Max's own struggle is about sheer survival -- and if Jack DiFalco is his dream come true, Kieron Charig is the gift he could never have expected.
Heya, so anyone who has spent any time on here will know that Mel Keegan happens to be one of my favorite authors. I have yet to read a Keegan book that I dislike. There are a couple that I do not think are as good as the other ones but mostly that's because I felt that he was trying to squish too much into too small of a space.
So, what did I think of Mindspace. I wasn't sure what to expect when I started this book but I wasn't disappointed. There were definitely a number of twists and turns in here that I did not see coming. It was a good safe book in a number of ways with a happy ending. It was fun to read but in truth I felt that this book lacked a lot of the darker edges that exist in most of the other Keegan books I've read.
There is nothing wrong with this and the darker content was there beneath the surface but it was not the focus on this novel.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there was a surface level to this novel that I don't felt like we moved past. I felt like that with the story, it was an easy story with a fairly easy end and not a lot of build up to it. I also felt like there was a surface level to all of the characters. They were developed but only to a point.
Over all, the book was not bad for any of these points but it did not have the depths that a lot of Keegan's other works have. It was a good fun read. :)
Author: Mel Keegan
Type: Male Slash, Science Fiction, Action, Adventure, Romance, Drama
Length: 248
Rating: Good
Blurb: On the far frontier, life is tough when you're a transspace pilot stripped of your license to fly. The good jobs go to graduate guildsmen who make the professional grade ... and who play by the guild's rulebook. Jack DiFalco broke the rules. Busted, he found himself on the wrong side of the law and the rough side of the guild -- and his crime was mindspacing ... playing one of the incredible high-tech games which are changing the future of humanity.
Playing not in VR, but in the gamespace, the total-immersion rigs where players enters the realm of the machine. And some of them don't make it back out. Kieron Charig is a transspace navigator. He went through guild school with Jack, but unlike Jack he has no patience for the game, or for gamers. Mindspacing is the major tool of the navigator's trade - the big transspace ships are flown via a symbiotic relationship where the mind/machine interface is dangerously blurry. Kieron works there; he scorns to play there -- and like all transspace flightcrews he fears the consequences.
The irony is that it's Kieron, not Jack, who will pay the ultimate price, while Jack is plucked out of a rough, dirty underworld and propelled into places more opulent than the games he has played. But success comes with strings attached, and at a high price. Jack will pay his dues with skill, courage and even sex. For Kieron Charig, no price is high enough, and every moment is a battle to preserve what remains of his humanity. Everything they are, everything they might be, pivots on Max Gorodin -- who stands at the helm of the aerospace giant, Jabalpur Indistries. Max's own struggle is about sheer survival -- and if Jack DiFalco is his dream come true, Kieron Charig is the gift he could never have expected.
Heya, so anyone who has spent any time on here will know that Mel Keegan happens to be one of my favorite authors. I have yet to read a Keegan book that I dislike. There are a couple that I do not think are as good as the other ones but mostly that's because I felt that he was trying to squish too much into too small of a space.
So, what did I think of Mindspace. I wasn't sure what to expect when I started this book but I wasn't disappointed. There were definitely a number of twists and turns in here that I did not see coming. It was a good safe book in a number of ways with a happy ending. It was fun to read but in truth I felt that this book lacked a lot of the darker edges that exist in most of the other Keegan books I've read.
There is nothing wrong with this and the darker content was there beneath the surface but it was not the focus on this novel.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there was a surface level to this novel that I don't felt like we moved past. I felt like that with the story, it was an easy story with a fairly easy end and not a lot of build up to it. I also felt like there was a surface level to all of the characters. They were developed but only to a point.
Over all, the book was not bad for any of these points but it did not have the depths that a lot of Keegan's other works have. It was a good fun read. :)