Honestly, I picked up Chindi at the library because it was a paperback, and I was sick of reading hardback books. Really. Big old clunky hardbacks. Feh. I wanted a good paperback book, something I could put in my overcoat pocket (yes, I have big overcoat pockets, big enough for a 500-page mass-market paperback, but not big enough for a hardback or even a trade paperback. Well, I do have an overcoat with a big inside pocket into which I could slip a slim trade paperback without mangling it, but the other pockets of that overcoat are torn, so I don’t wear it much anymore).
Chindi is what I think of as good old-fashioned science fiction. There are spaceships and scientists, there are bizarre physics problems that don’t really make any sense, and which are solved in ways that seem logical but don’t really make any sense, either. There are intrepid explorers, perhaps a trifle too intrepid. Why is it that the opposite of intrepid is trepidacious? What happened to trepid? I would never use trepid, but I would clearly use intrepid. Intrepid. See? Although, honestly, I’m not sure I would ever seriously call an actual person intrepid. Sarcastically, yes, I could imagine that, and certainly I use it to refer to certain stock characters in fiction and film, but in real life? I do have a friend or two who I would happily describe as fearless, and likely as foolhardy or just insane, but intrepid? Hm. I should check news accounts to see if soldiers are called intrepid these days, or if they were called intrepid in the forties. It would be a simple search, but I have enough windows open as it is.
Where was I? Was that a digression? End digression. You know, just in case.
Oh, yes, Chindi. It’s really quite good. There’s a little too much character development, given that the characters aren’t terribly interesting, and the development tends to happen in between the plot bits. I don’t mind a fictional character discovering something about himself and his relation to other people, but I do object to “He thought to himself, now I am discovering something about myself and my relation to other people as he clung to the hull of the ship. Well, enough discovering things about myself and my relation to other people, he thought, I’ve only got ten minutes of air left.” Fortunately, it’s pretty clear at the beginning of a sentence when it’s going to be like that, and there are handy paragraph marks indicating where the reader can join in our regularly scheduled prose.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
A cursory search at Google News suggests that soldiers are rarely intrepid, but reporters and kayakers often are.