Armor, by John Steakley

Armor was an entertaining, if not interesting read. It was, at the same time, too predictable in it's plot and yet too implausible .

If you have not read the book, try Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" as a vastly better developed alternative. The most generous I feel I can honestly be about the book is, in the same way that Starship Troopers was a book that could not fairly succeed as a movie, Armor seems to be a wonderful movie who script was accidentally made into a book, a form in which it cannot really succeed.

To look at Neal Stephenson's definition of what science fiction is, this isn't it.

"[Science fiction is] Fiction that's not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that's set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn't find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, "That's interesting. I never thought of that before." If it's got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction. That's really the role that science fiction has come to play in literature right now. In arty lit, it's become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se."

From Salon.com interview with Neal Stephenson, April 21, 2004, http://www.salon.com/books/int/2004/04/21/stephenson/index.html
This book is, at most, a space opera. Not in any way Science Fiction, and if that is the type of book you, like me, enjoy, disappointing at most.

For those who have read the book, (Spoilers Until end of review:) I feel that Felix was not portrayed as a full character. The transition from green, untested fighter to veteran was completely inexplicable, and the transition from Felix to _________ was not only predictably, but almost inexplicably badly done, given the setup. It was not even so much that room was left to see how Felix changed, but that a significant change on his part was left out, period. Jack Crow, the evil schemer turned moral good guy, a character that managed to be both a stock character with a typical turnaround, and a main character, never a good thing if the plot is supposed to twist. (I detected more than a bit of a tribute in the form of Captain Jack Sparrow, from last summer's "Pirates of the Caribbean", but one can never be sure.)

In terms of originality, I was actually rather surprised to note that while I could at first see Armor being set in Heinlein's Starship Trooper Universe, it was in fact just amazingly badly done development of a world.. The Plot was only slightly better, following in the footsteps of such Science fiction classics as "The Gods Themselves" (Asimov) in it's switching viewpoints, just not as well tied together. The rather lame attempt to "define a hero" fails miserably as we see that Felix finally broke, inexplicably, and the plot resolves oh-so-predictably with one final fight scene. I'm still not sure why or how his Schitzophrenia was supposed to have been miraculously cured, or what, exactly, we were supposed to gain from the book.