Ring Around The Sky

It was in a Star Trek omnibus, I thought it looked vaguely interesting and on the basis that if it was any good there'd be a lot more of them to read, I thought I'd give it a go. Well, I suppose it was all right, but I won't be rushing out to get any more in a hurry, and this was the only one in the omnibus I read. It was pretty mediocre to be honest. The setting wasn't that well described in my opinion--it felt a bit more like you were expected to know what it was like, or the author just couldn't be bothered with that side of things. The ring around the planet was, by contrast, quite well described. There was, however, little action, and the characters were rather flat. The conflict between the characters felt a little clumsy, though there was an interesting background, even if the cause of the conflict (supposedly hidden?) was relatively obvious from about fifteen minutes in. To be fair though, it was a rather short story so you can't expect perfect characters and detailed settings. That's why I say mediocre/average rather than poor, but I must confess, I don't generally like the shorter novels. I prefer something with a bit more meat on the bones so to speak. In fact, there are only two shorter novels I've enjoyed (both quick reads). One was Hell Island by Matthew Reilly, and the other was set in a merchant navy training vessel in the eighteen hundreds, with the main character a kid who had been sent there for theft. Can't remember what it was called or who it was by, sorry. Oh, I suppose the Biggles books are fairly short, and there are short story collections. But I prefer the full novel Biggles ones to the collections of short stories, although even the short stories are generally quite linked. So yeh, I'm not a big fan of the shorter stuff, which is probably part of the reason I didn't enjoy it so much. I can't recommend it though. It's not a terrible story, and if you're into Star Trek, I guess you might enjoy it. But i found it a bit disappointing.