A.J. Healy

I should have gone with my gut instinct about 50 pages in and dropped this turkey. It gets extra points for some inspired moments but overall this is poor SF "humour". If you've read anything in the humourous SF genre this will come as no surprise, if you haven't there's much better out there, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett (yes even the earlier stuff) come to mind. It's a story of five earth children who are sent to a space school to become Pseudo-Jedi, aka IGGY knights. There's an attempt to have footnotes and appendexes but these fell flat for me, the entire thing read like bad parody by someone vaguely familiar with the genre. The plot was paper thin and the entire thing seemed to be an exercise in showing how cleverly the author could manipulate puns. What's worse is many of those puns wouldn't be properly understandable outside of an Irish context, this gained them a few amused points, but that's my location bias sneaking in. I won't be looking for more books by this author.… (mer)