Book review: Empire

I saw Empire a while back as a hard cover and the dust jacket sounded incredible. When it made it to paperback, I grabbed it. I was underwhelmed.

The dust jacket/back cover make it out to be a really cool techno thriller (which it sorta was I guess) with high tech gear and some political intrigue and "oh my god that could be now" thrown in.

The political intrigue was there, the high tech gear was present, but almost completely as props on only a few pages. The "oh my god that could be now" was totally there.

With every page turned I kept thinking, "this isn't really that far fetched" sure the tech might be, but even then who knows, maybe not. Card did a good job in the believability department.

I think what let me down was the fact that part of the premise is that each side comes in with high tech gear that no one expects that that initially turns tables. While the bad guy's have that gear and that advantage, the good guy's stuff was mentioned in one paragraph as "oh yeah we've got stuff to break their stuff" (paraphrased) and that was it. From that point forward it was more or less just your average military fiction with some grisham type suspense thrown in.

It's a good read, but not at all was I hoping for.  Two Stars.