It's just odd that the ships have existed for this long and all of the sudden, in the time span of this book, all hell is breaking loose. So speaking of the action, it's good, although again, somewhat unbelievable as we have a population on a ship of around 500, and they seem to lose 4-5 every day during this book, amounting to a good 10% of vital members of the population (engineers, farmers, divers, etc) but nothing seems to slow down really. Perhaps future volumes give us more to chew on, but frankly, between all the calamities that befall the people in the book, in a couple of weeks no less, makes it hard to really focus much on anything but the action. But even then, the child is a typically precocious tyke who seems destined for 'greater things'. The main character has the most depth, and the author is trying hard to flesh him out by having him live in two worlds: a hell diver and an unexpected parent. Brave, tortured, rebellious, hot-headed - you can pin one of these attributes on most of the characters and not worry about the rest. Problematically, most of the characters are one-dimensional. So again, pretty original and pretty interesting. The divers have to make repeated trips to the now nightmarish land to scavenge supplies that keep the two remaining airships afloat, and with them, all of the human race.

Except for the exceedingly brave 'Hell Divers,' man has not lived on the surface for hundreds of years. The idea is pretty original and has a very interesting concept of the last vestiges of humanity living above Earth, but no longer being of Earth. I like this genre very much and had heard good things about the author, so I picked up Book 1 to see what it was all about.

Hell divers series in order