The story begins with our protagonist recollecting his past victories as a space hero. He used to be exploring planets and helping out their inhabitants but teleportation technology eventually made him obsolete and now nobody cares about space adventurers anymore. He has degraded to a tourist guide and occasionally pretends saving his bored customers from supposed pirates.
In the meantime, there’s a guy who is stealing the stories of the space pilots and presents them as his own, making a lot of money through books while the actual pilots are struggling for a job. He keeps his identity a secret because he knows well he will be lynched for what he is doing.
The protagonist is forced to pretend being that author during a job for a very needy rich guy. So yeah, it’s one of those liar type of stories where everything is fabrications and misunderstandings, with him constantly running away from angry colleagues and making up bullshit on every step of the way just so he can impress his client.
And this is pretty much the bulk of the plot. The hero goes to one place where he says something, someone else will deny it, the protagonist will make up some sarcastic comments, and after a long series of trolling each other he will move to the next place where the procedure starts anew. It’s all fairly predictable and despite half the jokes making me smile, I was simply not engaged with how straightforward everything was playing out.
Another thing that feels untapped is the world building. Despite every area having its distinctive look and history, it’s only used as background flavor and is otherwise disjoined with what is going on in the foreground. It could have been easily replaced with any other setting and the result would be the same because there is no actual interaction between the protagonist and his environment. People react to him but he doesn’t react to whatever they are doing. He’s pretty passive and does very little compared to the secondary cast, making the whole thing very self absorbed.
My interest fizzled out after the first third because of the repetitive structure of the story. With every area being an isolated incident and without much interaction, the plot is basically a line of standalone skits that play out in the exact same way. The introduction to the setting and the characters kept my interest at first but without some sort of evolving plot or developing characters, I was left with nothing to look forward to.
The jokes were no longer working since there was no gravity or meaning behind them, the transitions from one area to another were happening in very sudden and dry ways, the characters remained the static archetypes they began as, the conflicts were always being resolved anticlimactically, and in general nothing was changing from one event to another. It was the exact same satire of lying about being the author and space exploration being ruined for adventurers.
Although there is nothing particularly bad about the book, I found little engagement in it and consider it passable as a whole.
