Title Sisters of Glass Series --- Author D.W. St.John Cover Art --- Publisher Elderberry Press - 1999 First Printing Elderberry Press - 1999 Category Cyberpunk Warnings Racist and Homophobic main character Main Characters Karl, Romy, Willy, Tate, Villar, Bink Main Elements Cyberpunk

Karl Latte doesn't like the 21st century. Not recombinants, not Ultimate Reality, not Digitally Mastered Immortals. Most of all he dislikes the talent that's damned him-the ability to see into minds.

A forty-year-old ex cop with bad knees and a arrhythmic heart, he may be the last man in 2030 LA without a stcom implanted in his cortex. A 21st century Luddite with the skills of a gun-for-hire, he returns to take a case that's already left nine agents parted out.

The assignment takes him to a sea platform owned by the genetic conglomerate, Genesistems. His task: find Romy, one of the last surviving first-generation recombinants. Tall, slender, gifted, with a beauty as artificial as she is, Romy is the apogee of genetic perfection-and everything Karl loathes in a woman.

All Karl wants is to go home-but before he can he must smuggle Romy off the platform alive. Easier said than done. Genesistems wants them dead, a sadistic cabal murders Sisters two a night, and a 21st century demon lurks just out of sight, craving possession of them both.

Most alarming for Karl, as he grows to know the patented life form he has come to protect, his most charished prejudices teeter as his concept of what is human and what is not skews bewilderingly.

*Bangs head on desk in utter frustration*

I think I got this book from the Baen Free Library, and while the first few books I read from there were pretty good, I'm starting to find that not everyone was putting up, let's just say, their best work. There was so much wrong with this book and so little that was good, I'm not sure where to start.

Ok, the worst part? The characters. You know how in most books characters grow, evolve, learn, mature? Well, these characters are so stubbornly dense that time after time they don't catch on and come off as being dumb as rocks. Romy spends most of the book with a death wish, or too stupid to realize it's a death wish, somehow being oblivious to the fact that the bad men dragging her away might actually mean her harm, and that this other guy that nearly dies saving her over and over again might like her. And Karl, that guy I just mentioned, is just as bad, assuming Romy will think certain ways, react certain ways, and always saying the wrong thing, and I mean ALWAYS. And between the two of them we spend pages and pages of annoying angst and self-deprecation. I thought The Thomas Covenant novels were bad, but while the characters are about the same, as least in the latter the story is actually good.

Here the story starts out convoluted, in fact I couldn't even figure out what Karl was supposed to do (save Auri? save the sisters? just die already?). And though I've tagged the book as cyberpunk (which if I didn't it'd be almost a stretch to call this SF versus your regular action thriller fiction) that only comes in later. It had so much potential, it would have been interesting, in fact it's why I finished reading the darn book, but it was a side issue, introduced slightly in the start and only becoming a real plot issue towards the end, and of course completely overshadowed by the bickering between the two main characters.

Frankly I wanted to spend more time with Willy and Bink, at least they didn't talk all the time and never stop to think.

But then I guess this book was written for men. Lots of shooting and people getting killed, an entire harem of genetically engineered beautiful women whose intelligence is questionable, a tough guy main character who thinks with his gun instead of his brain (yeah sure, the author tried to give him a bit of a personality, but it failed, really, he's a thug even if he does prefer to live on his farm and loves his sister).

Even the fact that Karl is telepathic is almost a moot point. He barely uses it for anything useful, and while it can obviously make relationships a little tricky and made him in some ways too good a cop, the whole story could have been written without that aspect. It felt more like an excuse for Romy to find something in common with Karl, he's weird, she's weird, they must be meant to be. Ugh, one of the most irritating romances I've ever read (and don't think men can't write good romances, many men take female pen names to write romance).

Oh, almost forgot, Karl is also a racist (hates Mexicans which Villar is) and homophobic. On the positive side, those are not promoted as qualities and are treated as just a couple of his many many faults, and perhaps the one growth of character in this entire book is that he comes to respect Villar regardless of his nationality.

So an underused cyberpunk them, an annoying romance, frustratingly stubborn characters, genetic engineering and capitalism out of control. Unfortunately the good parts were completely overbalanced by the bad bits. Even though I've got a permanent copy of this I will not be reading it again, and while I'm not sure if it's still on the Baen site or not, I'm not providing a link since I can't recommend anyone spending time on this even though it's free.