This is the second book in Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker series. It’s not quite as much fun as the first book; it kind of creaks along in places, and there are even more wild improbabilities than in the first. For example, much of the action takes place on the factory world Technos IV. (Or was it Technos III?) The Empire is building a factory there to outfit the Imperial Navy with a new alien space drive that’s much faster than anything else available. But Technos has this weather problem: the summers are hotter than hell, the winters are colder than hell, the springs are wetter than hell (and all of the animal and plant life goes berserk), and the autumns are nice only by comparison. Oh, and each season is only Two Days Long.

Technos wasn’t always like this—it seems that there’s a system of weather control satellites that were hacked by cyber-revolutionaries, causing the extreme weather patterns. Two hundred years ago.

This is what they call a Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot plot development.

• Couldn’t the weather control satellites have been fixed by now?
• Failing that, wouldn’t simply blowing them out of the sky yield improvements to the weather?
• It’s a big Empire—aren’t there better places to build a factory upon which the survival of the Empire might depend?

Now, the whole series is kind of spoofy; it’s meant to over the top and farcical in places, but the problem is that Green also tries to insert a little serious character development here and there, and the serious bits and the silly bits make for an uneasy brew.

All that said, I wasn’t expecting much of anything else; and there were some good bits too. Certainly, the book kept me reading.