Planet Strappers, The by Raymond Z. Gallun (1911 - 1994)

Like the other review before me stated you get a story without the overdone heros and heroines, no incredible and illogical plot lines or other outrageous (but often entertaining) concepts requiring fantastic wonders to pull the story off. This is about seemingly regular people living in a time when space expoloration is possible. They pull together and with some exceptions they manage to get into space to find adventures that entertain but don't stray into the fantastic. However, in the beginning I found it somewhat difficult to keep my attention on the story. There was much character building while the characters were building their 'space suits'. I thought about why this was the case and discovered it was because I was expecting something more science fiction-like with how the characters interacted and built their equipment. As it was they ended up being regular people with an ambition that took the whole group working together to keep alive while real life tried to halt their dream of going into space from happening. Once in space things get more interesting in terms of science fiction action. Never being like an action adventure it still kept me hooked. Best of all there was a real sense of feeling close to the characters while they grew up fast from enduring their lives in space. I have already listened to this twice so I could get a better appreciation for the first part of their story. It was definitely better but I still felt myself drifting off with some of the chapters. Overall this would be a better than average listen for most people. 4 stars with one star left out for a than engaging first part of the story. For others this could easily be overlooked to achieve 5 stars.

The language and sentence structure here are dated enough to be hard to follow. Like reading a schoolbook from the 1950’s. But worse, one of the characters is named Gimp, and not in the fun way. Lots of characters and only two of them are distinguishable at all, one by a disability, the other is the woman. There may be a couple fresh ideas here, but I couldn’t get through it enough to find them. There’s zero sense of world building, plot, or character. Just stilted language and men.

no heros. just people living and dying in space. made a long trip in the car a lot shorter.