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Living on a 36th-century space station, 18-year-old Jak Jinnaka's seemingly normal life turns when strangers viciously attack him and kidnap his girlfriend, Sesh. When Jak learns Sesh is actually a princess from a distant world, and that he has been groomed from birth to be a secret agent, he sets out to free Sesh from her captor, the mysterious Duke of Uranium--and discovers a world he never knew existed.
When vicious thugs kidnap his girlfriend, Sesh, teenager Jak Jinnaka discovers that Sesh is really a princess from a distant world and that his uncle is a spymaster who has been secretly grooming Jak as a secret agent, as he embarks on his first assignment to ransom Sesh from her captor, the Duke of Uranium, who controls all fissionable material in human space.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Barry Elston
reviewed The Duke of Uranium (Jak Jinnaka Series #1) on January 10, 2008
The Duke of Uranium (Jak Jinnaka Series #1)
I requested a couple John Barnes books that I haven't gotten around to reading from the library. One I really wanted to read, but the other one, and its sequels, I always avoided, because from the blurb, frankly, I thought I'd hate it, though I like a lot of Barnes's work. (The Sky So Big and Black and the first three Giraut books.)
Thisshowed up before Orbital Resonance (the one I really wanted to read), so I figured I'd read it in the meantime. Honestly, I was right. I hated this book. About a hundred pages from the end I couldn't take it anymore, so I flipped ahead to the ending and then skimmed for the intermediate stuff that I needed to read to make the end more comprehensible.
The teenagers in the book are obnoxious, but not in an especially interesting or well-developed way. Character development in general is at a premium here, for the most part.
The future slang is ... meh. Heinlein generally did this right, Tiptree did this right, here it's just ... I don't know. I don't think of myself as particularly linguistically ignorant - I can usually figure out future slang from being familiar with a lot of languages at different levels, and/or from context, but here ... it's hard to strike a balance, sometimes, between "It's the 36th century, the language will have changed" and "I have to make my projected changes comprehensible to the 21st century reader." Here, I don't feel like it worked.
Pacing was wrong, characterization annoying, some interesting concepts. Read like bad Heinlein with Cherryh's ideas of shipboard culture mixed in. Barnes is capable of much better than this. 2.5 stars/5, rounding down to 2/5 for Goodreads.
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Add The Duke of Uranium (Jak Jinnaka Series #1), Living on a 36th-century space station, 18-year-old Jak Jinnaka's seemingly normal life turns when strangers viciously attack him and kidnap his girlfriend, Sesh. When Jak learns Sesh is actually a princess from a distant world, and that he has been groom, The Duke of Uranium (Jak Jinnaka Series #1) to your collection on WonderClub |
