Subject: Powers That Be

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1993 10:09:32 GMT

How disappointing.  "Powers That Be", by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough isn't actively bad, but it is unimaginative and formulaic.

We start with Intergal, a generic semi-evil Company.  It's such a two-
dimensional prop that no effort is made to make it make sense.  It's a
big company with career ladders and retirement plans and medical benefits.
And it also has the ability, as the plot requires, to field armies, to
deport and resettle whoever it wants to other planets, to arbitrarily
interrogate or blackmail its employees.

The book starts with Major Yanaba Maddock being invalided out to the
arctic planet of Petaybee.  (She was badly injured on another world
where the natives were being starved by the Evil Company.)  There she
is ordered/blackmailed/requested to help look into the planet's mysteries.
In particular, company teams consistently fail to find mineral deposits
identified from space.

Sure enough, there's a secret, but it's a silly secret -- the premise
isn't thought through very well -- and aside from its improbability,
it's used in as pedestrian a manner as two occasionally gifted writers
could manage.

The novel never gels.  The Company is a bad plot device used to set up
the situation and push it in whatever direction the authors require --
however much stupidity that may require on the part of Company officials.
The planet and its society are an idealized Arctic, but it could have been
interesting if it had been developed in a bit of depth.  The crisis has
no obvious justification beyond two writers saying "we need a crisis here":
The problem the company was facing was not the sort for which a small army
and high explosives were a reasonable answer.  And the romantic subplot
was a standard McCaffrey shoehorning.  Again, the novel isn't *bad*, but
it never lives up to its admittedly modest promise.

How disappointing.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

  Watership Down:  
  You've read the book.  You've seen the movie.  Now eat the stew!