Valice-Origins, by Ian Dean, is an almost 600 page “epic” sci-fi that, in the care of a good editor with a sharp scalpel, would have made a great novel.  Instead, the reader gets a droning, overwritten testament to the excesses of an unchecked author with a “vision”.

Set in the year 2211 on an alternate Earth, a race of cat-like people, the Felile, rise up to wage a resistance war again the evil Terra-Force Empire.  The book has no less that three separate narrators.  Vince, a human who becomes inadvertently involved in the resistance after discovering his sister Ruby is fighting the empire.  Veli, a Felile who experiences bizarre, cryptic nightmares that figure into the plot.  And Adago, another Felile with a secret lab and a secret past.  The multiple narrators add nothing to the story except confusion, because the jumps from narrator to narrator are poorly executed and they all talk in the first person in the same voice.  If the three narrators had distinct voices of their own, this might have been entertaining.  But instead the author writes them all out with the same longwinded narrative style.

The basic plot is the classic good resistance versus evil empire sort of thing.  Despite the additional of the Felile race to the mix, the Felile are little more than furry humans, and they behave pretty much like any other human race would be expected to.  The empire is evil because, as an empire, I suppose it is their job to be evil.  There doesn’t seem to be any serious cultural reason for it other than evil for evil’s sake.  Almost all of the heroes are those scrappy, young “we can do anything” sort that hint at having a deep personality but don’t actually do anything controversial or overly out of character.  And yet, despite the fact that the author doesn’t bring anything new to the mix, the story just keeps going…and going…and going…

Scenes that could have been wrapped up in a few paragraphs drag on for pages.  Action sequences have the intensity sucked out of them by overly wordy explanations and flashbacks that don’t really add anything to the scene at hand.   And of course the author breaks the “show, don’t tell” advice every other page.  He tends to tell the reader everything, instead of letting the action speak for itself. 

At 300 pages, this could have been a fun, wild space adventure.  But at almost 600 pages, this book just drags.  I found myself flipping through pages, skimming sections waiting for something to happen.  Valice-Origins is billed as the first of a trilogy.  I hope the author reigns in his prose and tightens up the story so that the rest of the trilogy can actually be as entertaining as it should be.

More about the book
http://www.valice.net/