sfgale

What a real pleasure it is to read a book with a beginning, a middle and an ending, as apposed to an endless stream of whacking great tomes that go nowhere fast. I liked this a lot. I've been in just the right kind of mood lately for a nice bit of raging, seething vengeance, and I wasn't disappointed. That is, not until our raging, seething protagonist turned into the Buddha of a sudden. It's not all bad though since it really worked and it's always good to see a character grow so much over the course of say, oh... a few hundred pages, rather than grow NOT AT ALL over the course of a FEW HUNDRED BOOKS(I might be exagerating slightly, but not much). Anyway, this is the story of Gully Foyle who is passed over by another ship when he lets loose with the distress signals like there's no tomorrow. He escapes his fate and decides to turn his entire life into one long FUCK-YOU-FEST when he goes after the ship and henceforth it's crew to exact his raging and seething revenge. I don't want to ruin it for you so I'll just say it's not all FUCK-YOU and seething and raging in the end.

An absolutey fantastic story with characters that actually grow over the course of it all, and on top of that our forever-friend Mr Bester manages all of this without having to resort to a single extra volume, no dinky little maps at the front of the book and no endless appendices of the characters family trees along with their entire ancestors backstories.

Oh, and one last thing. 'Jisbella', henceforth and eternally etched into my very being, and now known affectionately as 'Jiz' has to be the single most fantastically, beautifully named character in the entire history of anything... ever! If I had ever had a daughter her name would have been 'Jisbella'.

Jiz... (just because I can)