The story is remarkably reminiscent of The Spaceship in the Stone by Igor Nikolic, which I read and reviewed in 2022.
I read The Starship in the Stone by M. R. Forbes only to 49%, at which time I gave up and put it aside. You might say that’s a long way to go into a book before abandoning it. I agree. The author is a pretty good writer, who has a little bit of a Stephen Kingesque touch and tells a good story. The problem is that the story itself is not very interesting or refined. He just lost me.
This is the first book of a series of ten books so far. Given that I wasn’t able to make it through the first one, I will definitely not go for the next nine.
The story starts out in Manchester, England. A bicycle courier named Thomas, the protagonist, has a troubled past and is trying to work his way out of a life of crime and failure. During one of his delivery runs he passes by an alley where he hears cries for help by a woman. Against his better instincts, he decides to help whoever is in trouble and gets into a life-and-death conflict with an armed assailant. But rather than coming out as the hero, he ends up being framed as the villain and arrested by police. When he realizes that his situation is hopeless, he busts out before they can book him and starts his journey as a fugitive. This whole lead-in plot is well written and crafted, but it really has nothing to do with the story of the Starship in the Stone. The author spent some 20% of the book on a lead-in that was, in my opinion, not necessary and did not contribute to the overall plot.
As Thomas escapes by train and bicycle in the woods, he comes upon a secret military facility in a cave. An artificial intelligence contacts him and assists him entering the cave. There is a starship that has been buried in stone underground for 1,500 years, since the days of King Arthur. It’s in the process of being dug out by the military.
The alien intelligence decides, after 1,500 years of searching for a “worthy” human to pilot the starship, after seemingly thousands of military people and others through history didn’t fit the bill, it was finally Thomas who was the anointed.
By subjecting himself to alien technology, he is able to melt she ship out of the mountain and fly it. As soon as he is in earth orbit, there are enemy aliens that have been waiting for this for the last 1,500 years ‘behind Mars” who come out and seemingly instantaneously engage him in a space battle.
You get the idea, there is no realistic space travel science here. Ships coming out from behind Mars can’t just attack around Earth within minutes. It takes light between 3 minutes and 22 minutes, with an average of 12.5 minutes, to get from Mars to Earth, so if the spaceships traveled even at the speed of light, it would take some time. This is just one of the examples of magic masquerading as science that permeates this book and makes the story more of a cartoon or superhero tale, rather than a science fiction book I would be interested in.
Sprinkle in that King Arthur and his associates were actually aliens that came in that very spaceship, and you see how it’s mixing earthly legend with science fiction and magic technology.
Don’t get me wrong, Forbes is a good writer, and I am sure he has a great following for his series of ten books so far, but he could not keep my attention.
As usual, I do not give a rating to books I don’t finish reading. I just review them here and provide my reasons.