Meghan's Reviews > The Demon Princes

There was some imaginative world-building and fascinating inter-planetary societies in these interrelated stories, but I found that the pacing of the narratives wavered. Many of the stories tried to draw suspense from narrative twists that were too predictable and at times, I found the endings anti-climatic, too "pat" for the kind of morally grey world that the Oikumene seems to be. The treatment of the female characters also annoyed me - for the most part, they felt like flat characters there to serve as escapist love interests for the hero rather than as significant players in their own right. This might have been par for the course in the space operas of the '60s, but as a modern reader, I find that the lack of female agency really bothered me and distracted from my enjoyment of the stories, especially because I didn't particularly like or identify with Kirth Gersen.