I have read and reread Space Viking enough times that certain passages are memorized. The first effort of a sequel suffered from typos or formatting errors to make the work look inferior to others that Mr. Carr's Pequod Press has been delivering these last years. The story though was a well thought out what could occur in a future a hundred years on.

Here we have the sequel to the sequel, which we saw coming at the end of the previous book. That book finishing before the tale was complete. Not as Space Viking had finished with a satisfying conclusion and many possibilities that could be in its future. No, we knew we would have Throne since Legacy ended in the middle of its story.

Thus this is not a stand alone book either. You have to read Legacy to enjoy this novel, and that makes these tales very expensive propositions. Further we have a major plot element that fizzles away. Major and it goes to nothing.

That is something we see more and more with Carr's work these days. That he has too much he is juggling and overbalances on one element to the exclusion of another. This issue is highlighted with the introduction of names of forgettable people. He brings on many to give them a position in his hierarchy and command structure and then they are forgotten again. Piper did not have that problem. We had as many as we needed and they all advanced over time into roles we could see. The same with planets in his sphere of influence, but here Carr creates an alliance, but he doesn't follow up with it. His hero Morland spends thousands of hours on his home world, attending to problems that are certainly off camera and unmentioned so that the critical ones can be talked about. Yet when they are addressed, he seems to have been doing nothing in between the problems, and taking forever in terms of years to date his love interest.

Carr throws around a thousand hours here, and there, and so often that you wonder if Carr had a calendar at hand to see how much time he was adding up. The scope of the novel seems to be decades at times, and humans age over that amount of time, yet during those decades not much changes, and whereas Piper spent time making a coalition of his planets, Carr just gives one line or two to the formation of his trading alliance, but wraps it all up again in a line at the end when he resolves the integration of the Piper terro-human history line and the rise of the Mardukian Empire.

So, not as great and as true to Piper as it should be. And not as great as it could be. But a fun read nevertheless and one day, when all the Viking works are collected together, might be worthy of a second read. ( )