Do you still remember Con Air with Nicolas Cage from the mid-1990s? Or even better - the rather unknown Lockout starring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace? Yes? Then you are quite close to the idea of what Edward Stern's book is - and if you combine it with the classic of the genre "Who Killed?" the likes of Murder on the Orient Express , you are already at home.
The title Nadir is a self-sufficient prison-ship, rushing endlessly through the cosmic void. A ship that does not require a crew, and its only cargo is a few convicts, genetically modified to give them the longest possible sentence. Their routine of existence is interrupted by an unexpected find: here on the lower, until now virtually uninhabited, deck of the ship, the heroes find quite fresh traces of someone’s presence. Not long later, one of the prisoners is murdered, and from there the questions start to pile up like mushrooms after the rain. Why did someone put them in this particular place, and not in one of the planetary penitentiaries? What is the purpose of their trip? What is hidden in the lower deck, full of impenetrable doors, sinking in the dark? And the most important of them: who killed?
the great unknown
At the very beginning, Strun asks quite a lot of questions – but he is worse at answering it. As you may have figured out, Nadir’s action takes place in a rather distant future – one in which man has already colonized the solar system. In theory, then to Nadiryou could label science fiction on the go, but reading it it turns out that it is not so obvious – there is as much science here as the cat cried. It is a pity that the author makes so little use of the scientific element of the genre, because if in any part of the text there are word-formation terms for new technologies, such as “tenebrisution engines”, without properly explaining them, it creates a rather not too serious impression of pseudoscientific gibberish. In the later parts of the novel, it is much better in this respect, and even some incomprehensible terms are explained over time. However, the feeling that the presentation of the presented world takes place “in the head” remains.
Paper people
Therefore, we do not know much about the world presented and the principles on which it operates, and the characters are not better either. Edward Strun goes to the merits, i.e. the polite hunt for a “murderer among murderers” so expressly that we do not even know the names of all characters yet. It is all the more striking as it is hard to call them anything other than walking sets of stereotypes. Among the prison brothers, we will find a silly bully, a boss of a Mexican gang prone to outbreaks of violence, a pedophile who is being scolded by the rest of the gang, and finally a psychopathic intellectual – a set that we have probably seen in every film with a prison in the background, in addition having sterile conversations with condensation. bluffers at the level of the work of Patryk Vega. Some of them Strun did not even give a trace of past, Therefore, it is difficult to treat them otherwise than as cannon fodder, and there is simply no one to cheer on in the fight against an unknown opponent. At least that’s what it looks like until Strun pulls a few aces out of his sleeve.
Light in the tunnel
Around the second half of the book, when we think that rolling our eyes will not be enough, an unexpected volt occurs in the plot, and it is immediately doubled. While the first time it does not change our attitude towards the whole, a dozen or so pages further on, Strings catch us with our guard down. It is difficult to call it something that we have not seen yet in the genre, but as if by the touch of a magic wand the goal that the author had been aiming at from the beginning emerges from the whole, and it must be admitted – not only is it completely unexpected, it also makes sense.
However, in truth, a successful reversal only emphasizes how uneven the book Nadir is . The poor – and I’m not sure if necessary – the first half of a novel can cause a lot of people to just bounce off it, considering it a waste of time to read. And although in the case of the work Struna one should by no means put in favor of the outstanding, Nadir did not deserve absolute criticism either.
