シルヴァー・タワー

One of Dale Brown's earlier works the story line is interesting although a bit dated. Good read.

-2 stars Kindle version. Recently added the Kindle version to my library. I was a bit disappointed with the editing and proofreading compared to the hard copy version. Numerous minor errors a little annoying. Format errors result in confusing transitions through out the version. Have seen this in other Kindle versions.

The author passed his English class. His writing is free of grammar and word choice errors. He gets a little overboard with his knowledge of military equipment.

I don’t know what happened to Mr Brown but this book is nothing like all the other excellent books I have read of his. So unrealistic, such a poor story. I am just dumbfounded as to who really wrote this story. Couldn’t have been Dale Brown.

advertised as very good, was only fair to good condition

The good: Great sense of world building. Descriptions, though sometimes clumsily relayed, are thorough nonetheless.

The bad: Mr. Brown has an extremely ponderous writing style, many times similar words are redundantly reused. I was expecting a page turner and instead the novel feels like the author had a length minimum to reach. The dialog reads in a stilted fashion, with repeated draconian adherence to naming conventions smothering many otherwise interesting exchanges.

Opt for Storming Intrepid by Payne Harrison instead.

This is my second attempt at a Dale Brown book. I’ll start with what’s good. First off, the book has a good depiction of life in space, and the technical challenges astronauts face. On the political side, all points of view were presented. I also found it ironic that what the United States is doing in the Middle East now is the same thing the Russians were doing in the book, resulting in this late 80s tale not being dated at all. Though the chapters are somewhat lengthy, they’re paced well, and the scene breaks occur at the right times. The characters are likable and believable too.
A few problems:
The story has redundancy issues with the space missions. For example, Ann’s shuttle launch dream took away some of the impact of the actual shuttle launch. Moreover, I felt she and her comrades should have been stuck on the station after the first attack, and stayed there until the end of the book. Sending them back to earth, and then flying them back up (which required yet another shuttle launch sequence) drove me nuts. In a book like this, people should be fired into space only once. The same went for the Russian Space Planes. After a while, I felt I was stuck in a Star Trek time loop.
The battle scenes were generally good, but the further you go into the story, the more confusing they get. And the climatic fight in the end was almost unreadable. Worse, I can’t even tell you how the book ended! Was it a victory? Who won? Was it a stalemate? Cliffhanger? Are we being set up for a sequel? Please explain!
Uggghhh, even though this was better than Flight of the Old Dog, which I wasn’t able to get through, I was still disappointed. Then again, these are his early books, perhaps his later works are better.