I'm really starting to think Emma Bull only had one solid novel in her and it's just good fortune that it was her first ("War for the Oaks"). Perhaps I'm being unkind and I do remember enjoying her Jacobean fantasy with Steven Brust, "Freedom and Necessity", but I also remember being very unimpressed with "Territory", an old west fantasy thing which I attributed to having no attachment to that period of history.
"Falcon" is her second novel and it really feels like she had the first acts of two different novels written and then smashed them together with the flimsiest glue. The back cover copy doesn't even mention the first half of the book, which means you spend a hundred odd pages wondering when the plot is going to start because the light political upheaval on another planet that's also just Wales with a royal family feels completely separate from the daring spaceship pilot with a mental link who's slowly dying because of all the wiring to connect his brain to said spaceship.
I read a very good version of something like this last year, Ken MacLeod's "Cosmonaut Keep", where a near-future cyberpunk narrative was intercut with a far future lost civilization science fiction narrative. It was calculated and thoughtful and purposeful. "Falcon" just feels like two clashing pasta dishes thrown at a wall and Emma Bull scraped them onto a single plate and fed them to me.
