okaylib's Reviews > Escape Velocity

Reading this is like reading In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead but add a sub/dom relationship that appears completely out of left field, a couple space walks, and obscene amounts of MONEY. We follow a group of friends at a high school reunion (in space!) where it is *shockingly* revealed that one of the friend's brothers was murdered back in high school. What follows is very heavy handed foreshadowing, characters with flimsy motivations and unstable characterizations, an uninteresting setting, and a poorly done critique of capitalism.

The reason I picked this up is because it was supposed to be a bunch of rich fucks being dramatic on a luxury liner in space. How fun! But for a book set on a luxury liner in space, it decidedly did not feel like we were in a luxury liner in space. There was so little atmosphere, so little purpose, the only thing holding us in this place were a few mentions of the views and the aforementioned space walks.

The main science fiction element of this story is this system of MERIT points that allows certain people to go to a new colony on Mars. Now, this is supposed to show how corrupt society is because only rich people with "good" jobs get enough points to settle Mars. And even the super rich people still have to vie for their places on Mars with political scheming, social maneuvering, and . . . BDSM. Okay yeah, that's, like, a really bad system.

But the way the MERIT points are described and implemented in the novel makes it not only a bad system but also simply not make sense. First of all, we don't understand why the characters want to go to Mars. Sure, Earth is burning up, but surely Mars isn't the only place to run to? Why does literally every single person on this ship want to go to Mars? What about places on Earth that are still habitable? What about underground bunkers? What about, perhaps, a luxury liner in space? No? Oh, okay, a completely underdeveloped colony on Mars where there are no poor people for you to exploit. Yep, that's definitely what every rich person dreams of.

Something else that bothered me more than it probably should have was the use of multimedia elements (only two of them throughout the whole book) to show how this system works. No only do we get to hear the characters talking (and thinking) at length about how the system works, but we also get a bunch of pages of faux-legalese and tables (so fun!) explaining all the things we already knew about the system (very necessary!), just in more detail than we need to understand the concept and in a super boring format. So fun! Very necessary!

You're probably wondering what this sub/dom and BDSM is all about. I am as well. Surely it's not for representation because the relationship was completely nonconsensual? Surely it's not for character development because non-consent should never be used as a tool for character development? Who knows.

Finally, let me go on a lengthy monologue about the end of this book. No wait, TWO lengthy monologues! Actually, I will spare you and not do that. But you know who didn't spare us from TWO lengthy monologues that explain all of the reasons why all of the things happened and tell us all the information we were waiting for the entire book at the very last second through this over used and objectively bad method? I'll let you take a guess.