This debut novel from Philip Palmer has met with a lot of luke warm reviews on the Internet and I for one do not know why. This is such an originally told science fiction/speculative fiction yarn that I cannot but help feel that certain reviewers set too lofty a design on the impact this novel would bring. To me this novel was nothing but a joy to behold. Right from the introduction: the kidnapping of a very powerful and long lived female named Lena, this novel delivers a very snappy and artfully constructed space opera that enthralled me. Lena is the mother of the Cheo - the de facto, very evil, overlord of all human space. The rag tag and motley crew of uber space pirates that have kidnapped this harridan know her true worth ... or it would appear they have miscalculated. Apparently, the Cheo doesn't care what fate befalls his mother. Tell me that this isn't a plot with a difference. Right from the get go I got this immediate feeling that the author gained immeasurable fun from writing this novel (such a rarity I'm led to believe). He steadfastly and unabashedly gives us the most intimate details of Lena. From her humble beginnings to her present day situation everything about this woman, and how she came to be one of the most reviled, brilliant, insane, corrupt, dangerous, empathic and most of all, overlooked human beings was a tenderly savage recounting. At times his prose was just magnificent, not always, but the very good made up for the less that stellar recollections of her past. Simply put, this novel is the proverbial page turner. At times I felt this book should have been retitled something like "Lena's Tale" - the storyline of her fantastic, no, her fantastical rise from mousy academic to one of the oldest and longest lived human beings sailing through interstellar space runs the entire human gamut. The author also employ this strangely perverse, yet highly visual approach with the typeset (you'll know it when you see it) that draws out a very emphatic sense of danger and exhilaration when characters tell their tale. Lena is in turn draw into the pirates' plan of freeing the planets of the wickedly run stellar corporation upon which the Cheo rules. This novel is populated so many ideas and events and various offshoots of humanity that the only failing is that not enough attention was given to the after effects of wondrous technologies which pampered uber humans take for granted. Wonderful, simply wonderful; I don't care what the general consensus on this novel is, I LOVED IT!.

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