This is the second part in Mike Resnick's Tales of the Galactic Midway and to review it requires some spoilers for book one, so if you haven't read this first book beware...

So you can't say I didn't warn you...

Book one ended with Thaddeus Flint's Sideshow having decided to leave Earth and attempt to ply their trade amongst the stars. Things however do not go quite as smoothly as they might.

Alien races are not so easy for them to amuse as on Earth, for one thing the exotic dancers amongst the troupe do not have quite the draw that they had on Earth. The lead dancer, Gloria who dances under the name Butterfly Delight, heads into a mood of despair – dancing for the enjoyment of a crowd being the only thing she has ever been any good at, and this crowd reaction is now denied her.

And Gloria is not the only person who feels that things have not gone well since the troupe left Earth.

This is a short book, and a very fast paced read. My favourite length of fiction is novella, and this does not run much longer than that so it suits my taste, but being short it does not lend itself to much in the way rich background detail. It does, however, manage to include a high degree of action in its pages.

Resnick is a writer on the action/adventure end of science fiction, he is also a writer who does not shy away from adult content, including the strippers in the show. This book does not include great detailed science, nor does it spend time explaining exactly how the starships work. But this does make the book easy to read as I've found all Mike Resnick stories to be.

He also has the knack of expressing character profiles and personality traits in just a phrase or two. He does this by cleverly using known types and, to an extent, stereotypical characters to make up the numbers. Although this is not a bad thing, certainly not as bad as it might sound as he uses them to make alien situations more easy to absorb.

Okay this is not a patch on other Resnick titles, certainly when you consider this is the author of Santiago, Dark Lady and Ivory. But given this fact it is still well worth a read, and with Farthest Star having reissued this as part of a four volume omnibus edition at a good price it is worthy of consideration.