Very engaging storytelling, but I felt it needed another go through with an editor to tidy up the prose and typesetting. ( )

Very engaging storytelling, but I felt it needed another go through with an editor to tidy up the prose and typesetting. ( )

Su nombre en clave es Sparta. Su belleza oculta un misterioso pasado y habilidades de supermujer fruto de la biotecnología avanzada. Cuando la averiada nave espacial Star Queen llega a la Estación Venus con un solo superviviente a bordo, Sparta debe arriesgar su vida para investigar lo que sucedió realmente durante el mortal viaje por el espacio.

A story with 3 sub-plots: a woman who's been raised with mental & physical enhancements--now with an erased memory--is on the run (from the Illuminati?); 2 men on a spacecraft have only enough air for one to survive the trip; a rich jerk buys a rare book, just to spite the woman who stole his girlfriend from him. The denouement is almost pretty good--but the tie-ups are decent--but not "pretty good". ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3395861.html

This was part of a Humble Bundle that I got in 2016 because of various Zelazny-related items. It's an expansion of "Breaking Strain", a 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke, and the first in a series of six volumes by Preuss featuring the mysterious Sparta, whose memories of her own origin are unclear and unreliable, and gets mixed up with a very weird plot involving the transport of a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom to the planet Venus. It started a bit clunky but developed well enough and kept my attention to the end; not Great Literature but a step or two ahead of the pulp stories which it is rooted in. ( )