I grabbed three novels by Platt because I saw him listed as a Prometheus Award nominee--for Free World and Silicon Man--one of the novels I own but haven't yet tried. I did just read his Twilight of the City and found it lacking--in fact didn't even finish that one, although the writing and characterizations are if anything stronger than in Planet of the Voles. What kept me reading Planet of the Voles was an intriguing concept I hoped might have a good payoff. Tomas is on a ship filled with his artificially conceived brethren. They're genetically designed to be warriors with two exceptions--Tomas, who is supposed to be an artist for the sake of their morale, and Jon, a lowly technician designed--literally--to take care of the ship. This ship has been engineered and sent this way by what was once a pacifistic Earth because their colonies have been invaded by the Voles--humanoids supposedly from another galaxy who wipe out their entire ship--except for Tomas and Jon--leaving them to somehow get to the planet below and survive and find a way to prevail against the occupation force that was supposed to be liberated by a thousand warriors.
All that is the setup you can read in the back of the book and in the first 19 pages. The problem is that by the time I got to the end of the book at page 192 I was left feeling, is that all? I expected there to be more to the Voles than it first appeared, and more to Tomas, and there wasn't really quite enough. Never mind it was fairly open-ended and crying for a sequel, while I was left inclined to read one. Mind you, I love a good space opera: Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber, let alone Star Trek and Firefly are shameless pleasures of mine. But whatever makes those worlds and characters come alive for me are absent here.
