Book review: Terminal Alliance

Well, no, this isn’t so much a review of the book Terminal Alliance by Jim C. Hines as it is a review of its marketing.

The book itself is hardly worth reviewing. Not that it’s bad. No, I enjoyed it, and I’ll probably go ahead and read the second book in the series (there are three, I’m not committing at all to the third just yet). It’s nothing profound, just some lightweight space opera, but pretty well plotted and written. I’ll give it four stars out of five.

I’ll give the marketing one star:

In his hilarious new sci-fi series, Jim C. Hines introduces the unlikely heroes that may just save the galaxy: a crew of space janitors.

I’m guessing you’ve seen a sentence like that before. More than one.

Jim takes us into a brand-new universe of entertainment certain to appeal to fans of both Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.

And a few like that.

It’s weird. There are no funny books any more. No amusing books. No humorous books. No, the only non-serious books these days are hilarious. That’s the only word now considered acceptable to describe them.

I’m old enough to remember when “hilarious” meant something that made you laugh, out loud, repeatedly, frequently, consistently, emphatically. ROFL, even.

This book: I laughed out loud. Once. Aside from that, not even an audible chuckle.

Look, the jokes were not bad (mostly). They were amusing. Again, it’s not the book I’m criticizing.

Still, perhaps Hines would be disappointed to read that paragraph. Perhaps he was aiming for hilarious. Honestly? I don’t think he was. This book does not read like a Douglas Adams book — not even a lame attempt at a Douglas Adams book. Adams was hitting you relentlessly with joke after joke, absurdity after absurdity, on every page. Terminal Alliance throws you a joke once in a while. It’s not that Hines isn’t in the same league as Adams — he’s playing a different game.

The comparison to Pratchett isn’t quite as groan-inducing. Pratchett wasn’t playing the same game as Adams, either, and Hines is closer to the former. Still, the “hilarious” tag and the comparison to Adams and Pratchett is the height of copywriting laziness. (I weep for the LLMs that are learning this is how to write marketing copy.) And I think most of the fans of Adams and Pratchett, and most of everyone else who’s looking for a genuinely very funny book, have long since come to realize this kind of marketing is to be ignored, or perhaps one should actively shun any book so marketed.

I didn’t shun this one, though I had to talk myself into not doing so, and I’m mildly glad I didn’t. But it’s not hilarious. It’s not Adams. It’s not Pratchett. And it’s pretty good.