Corsair

By: James L. Cambias

Narrated by: Victor Bevine

In the early 2020s, two young, genius computer hackers, Elizabeth Santiago and David Schwartz, meet at MIT, where Schwartz is sneaking into classes, and have a brief affair. David is amoral and out for himself and soon disappears. Elizabeth dreams of technology and space travel and takes a military job after graduating.

Nearly 10 years later, David is setting himself up to become a billionaire by working in the shadows under a multiplicity of names for international thieves, and Elizabeth works in intelligence, preventing international space piracy. With robotic mining in space becoming a lucrative part of Earth's economy, shipments from space are dropped down the gravity well into the oceans.

David and Elizabeth fight for dominance of the computer systems controlling ore drop placement in international waters. If David can nudge a shipment 500 miles off its target, his employers can get there first and claim it legally in the open sea. Each one intuits that the other is their real competition but can't prove it. And when Elizabeth loses a major shipment, she leaves government employ to work for a private space company to find a better way to protect shipments. But international piracy has very high stakes and some very evil players. And both Elizabeth and David end up in a world of trouble. Space pirates and computer hackers...James L. Cambias' Corsair is a thrilling near-future adventure!

©2015 James L. Cambias (P)2015 Audible Inc.

Good and Plenty

Pirates with computers! A near future action-adventure with plot twists that surprise and delight. There were so many tense moments that I almost started smoking.

The characters were developed perfectly.

Little slow to start because the characters had to be developed, but once the story got going, it was really difficult to put the book down...or in this case, the headphones!

Addictive listen full of action/suspense and humor

If you could sum up Corsair in three words, what would they be?

Space Pirates! Hackers!

What did you like best about this story?

It was just a fun/addictive listen. It moved at a very good pace and had some bits of humor tossed in all the action/suspense.

What does Victor Bevine bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Narration was very good. Just the right amount of personality/inflection to really relay the tone of the book.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Made me laugh. Also was a book I didn't want to put down.

Decent, worth the listen.

The story was pretty good, captivating with enough uncertainty to keep it interesting. Victor Bevine, as always, was phenomenal. He makes it worthwhile by his performance alone.

Dull

This is a personal opinion. The book is well-written. Characters are varied. Plotting is ok. The narration is professional. Yet the book lacks 'soul' for want of a better description. I find it unlikely that anything the Air Force is involved in would have such lax security for a project it is even remotely interested in. That's where I stopped reading.

It reads like those block-buster movies that have lots of scene changes to build the plot. And, like those block-busters, you are left with balony instead of steak. When I start to skip to the end of chapters to get on with the story, I realize I don't want to finish it.

P.S. I am a tremendous fan of 'The Martian'. Corsair does not compare.

Great Hacker Adventure

Space, Pirates and Hackers.... just the right mix! Interesting story narrated brilliantly by Victor Bevine. Very enjoyable!

A worthy plot, but a dull performance

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Neither agree nor disagree

Would you be willing to try another book from James L. Cambias? Why or why not?

Sure, with a more charismatic reader it could come alive.

Would you be willing to try another one of Victor Bevine’s performances?

No

Was Corsair worth the listening time?

Eh

Any additional comments?

I'll give it to Victor that his pronunciation and pacing were spot on. Easy to listen to. However, there was no vigor in his performance. All dialogue was indistinguishable to inner monologue and heated arguments and debates seemed unimportant and boring.

Space pirates, hacking, and jihadists

This is James Cambias's second novel, and I'm enjoying his stuff, which is basically modern space opera with just enough of a veneer of scientific plausibility to make it hold up as well as, well, anything Heinlein and Asimov and that gang wrote back in the day.

In Corsair, we are dealing with a near-future (2030s) Earth which is disappointingly similar to the present day, just with faster bandwidth and various multinational corporations now mining Helium-3 on the moon. There are also "He3 pirates" who use drones and hacking to hijack a small percentage of the remotely operated He3 shipments and divert them off-course, where they can be picked up somewhere in the ocean and sold for enormous profits. So far neither nations nor companies have come up with a good solution to these pirates, other than to write off the losses as the cost of doing business.

David Schwartz is a brilliant but amoral hacker, thieving and conning his way aimlessly through life, when he hooks up with Elizabeth Santiago at MIT. Their brief fling becomes a rivalry years later, when David is "Captain Jack, the Space Pirate," and Elizabeth is a US Air Force officer trying to persuade her superiors that she has a solution to space piracy.

Elizabeth and David are both flawed people who make the rather straightforward plot more interesting. Elizabeth outright lies to get her way, with disastrous results on her career, and by the turning point she's become an almost hysterical alcoholic trying to convince the people she's screwed over to actually trust that she knows what she's talking about. Meanwhile, David seems to be nearly sociopathic in his indifference to other people for most of the book, and his genius at coming up with clever schemes is rivaled only by his stupidity in not recognizing what other people are up to and that they may be lying to him. He takes a job working for some shadowy Middle Easterners who want him to pull off a big hijacking scheme, except it turns out that they are actually the remnants of the global jihadist movement. With oil waning in importance, they need to do something big and spectacular to make the major powers take notice of them again, and David is basically being gulled into facilitating a lunar 9/11. The fact that he doesn't see this coming, or that his employers obviously do not intend to let him live one second longer than he is necessary, is obvious to everyone long before David finally figures it out.

The climax is a down-to-the-wire mix of chase scenes, firefights, and Hollywood hacking.

If not wholly plausible in every detail, I still enjoyed this book a great deal as a tense mix of techno-thriller and space opera. James Cambias's background as an RPG writer shows - all the characters are interesting collections of talents and flaws, and you can imagine a GM somewhere throwing twists in the narrative and making sure every character has something to do, even the almost irrelevant college girl who decided to go sailing around the world and was dropped into the plot seemingly at random.

More of a Slog than an Exciting Read

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

It passed the time. The ideas were good, but poorly executed. The book takes place in 2030-2031, yet every engineer, gamer, and hacker, and all but one scientist, were men. There was a definite immaturity to the writing, not bad writing, but the pacing was off and the intensity of the scenes was lost.

What do you think your next listen will be?

Either Downfall by Rob Thurman or Midnight Crossing by Charlaine Harris.

What does Victor Bevine bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He gave the story energy the writing lacked.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

No.

Completely enjoyable, straightforward hard sci fi

Some listeners may think that Corsair lacks depth but I would be entirely happy with a constant stream of books like this.