Starbreaker Review: A Prophecy Hook That Never Pays Off

What I was hoping for

Everyone loves a good prophecy fantasy, and nobody has ever done it better than Robert Jordan; whatever flaws Wheel of Time carries, no writer has woven a prophecy through a story with that much craft and mystery since. So when Starbreaker opened with the prophecy of the Starbreaker, I got genuinely excited. Add a tech-forward, futuristic setting, which the series does handle well, and a competent origin pace in book one that gets the character off his homeworld with his motivations intact, and I was in. I did three books. I ended up hating it, and the post-mortem is useful because the failure is specific.

The inconsistency engine

The problem is the main character, and more precisely, the way he's written to serve the plot instead of himself. His personality doesn't hold together, especially against his traumatic backstory, and the seams show more as the stakes rise. In book one, while he's new and playing everything conservatively, the wobbles are small enough to overlook. By book two they're constant: he responds to situations in ways that contradict who he's been established to be, and the supporting cast bends the same way, including a supposed master psychological manipulator who is comprehensively bad at the one job the plot assigned them. I can forgive a dose of plot armor or a sudden convenient ability if it makes the story more fun. What I can't forgive is characters acting against their own natures because the author needs a scene to happen. That's not a trope; that's the writing failing at its first job.

Book three's climax was the breaking point, and I'll keep it vague but honest: the character is handed what he believes is a suicide mission, retains a clean ability to withdraw, sits on a training world surrounded by allies who outrank the entire problem, and chooses, for reasons so thin they're insulting to the reader, to fight to the death anyway, surviving on pure happenstance. Even he seems to know the setup is forced. You can feel the author constructing a last-stand set piece and marching the character into it against his own logic, and when the big payoff scene of an entire book runs on that, the story stops being enjoyable, because you're no longer watching a person make choices. You're watching scaffolding.

The prophecy bait

Here's my real regret, and the reason I gave it three books instead of one: each book opens and closes with a taste of the prophecy, and I kept chasing the Robert Jordan of it all. It never comes. There are no passages woven through the narrative, no accumulating mystery, no payoff structure, just bookend teasers. If I hadn't been hungry for that specific flavor, I'd have trusted my gut after book two, when I noticed I was less engaged rather than more, which is the opposite of how a healthy series progresses. Consider this review me trusting my gut retroactively, in public, so you don't spend three credits learning it.

One more note, because it fits this site's whole thesis: Starbreaker's Amazon rating is dramatically higher than the book earns, high enough that I can't explain it, and it's part of why I kept going. Check the fact box above and calibrate accordingly.

Verdict

Not worth the credit. C-low. Chmilenko has co-written work I've enjoyed, the prose itself is serviceable to good, and the setting has real moments, so there may be readers who can look past a protagonist who doesn't cohere. I couldn't. If you want the prophecy itch actually scratched, Wheel of Time remains the answer, slow books and all. And if you want this author at his best, he's half of Warformed: Stormweaver, which is what I'd spend the credit on instead.