Title: A disappointingly bland story
Product review: I always feel resentful when I slog my way through a long book, waiting for it to grab me, and end up feeling like I've been eating cardboard. The author of "The Clone Republic" tries hard -- varied settings, lots of battles, a complex (if incomprehensible) background political environment -- but there's no life to the story. A romance with no romance. A brief affair with no sex. Battles with strangely invisible enemies and no sense of immediacy. A plot built around clones who seem, oddly, little different from the rest of us (what, no advances in genetics in 500 or so years?) and implausibly unaware of their nature. An 'advanced' clone type (our narrator) with nothing that justifies all the mystery surrounding him. A warfare that is basically World War II (maybe Vietnam if you add in gunships circling over, of all things, a beachhead on an actual beach) with bigger explosions. The story has lots of clichés and, sadly, little else.
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