The Mechanical, Ian Tregillis
Received to review via Netgalley

This one took me a weirdly long time to read, considering the fact that I don’t have major criticisms. I just… didn’t feel like reading it. In part that’s because of emotional stuff: tortures, transformations, losses… Tregillis writes well about these, and I tend to be bad at reading that. There’s one aspect of Visser’s character arc in particular that still has me cringing now. It’s worse with characters I feel more involved with, which is maybe the place that Tregillis failed to capture me. I’m not fascinated by his characters, so I didn’t have that drive to carry on reading and find out what happens, how they get out of their messes. I’m not sure I’ll read future books, because I only sort of want to know what happens to the characters, and I’m not sure if that’s enough to keep me going through the bad stuff.

And Tregillis definitely demonstrates he isn’t afraid to hurt his characters. There’s no real reassurance that there’ll be a happy ending. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it shapes my idiosyncratic response to the story.

In terms of plot and setting, it’s pretty awesome. He sets up an elaborate alternate history with mechanical servitors and alchemy, and a war between the French and the Dutch in consequence. There’s all sorts of philosophical stuff explored around this: concepts of the soul, theology, practical and societal changes… Tregillis doesn’t skimp on that kind of detail and background development at all. There’s room and to spare for more development as well: this isn’t a concept exhausted after the first book.

If I sound ambivalent, that’s a personal reaction; there’s a lot here to fascinate and absorb.

Rating: 4/5

The Explorer, James Smythe

I’ve been vaguely meaning to read something by Smythe for a while. This doesn’t really encourage me: the idea is interesting enough, but my interest waned from the very first chapter, because the narration is so flat and lacking in affect. I couldn’t care less about Cormac (or indeed, the rest of the crew), and the science was inconsistent enough that it didn’t capture my attention as a novel of ideas, either. (I mean, be clear: are you or are you not breaking Newton’s laws of the conservation of motion? If yes, why?)

It seemed… just rather too similar to various other books and sci-fi films that are around, without giving me anything that made it stand out. Which is a disappointment given that this book has been vaguely on my radar for a while, but not too surprising when I look at the reviews on Goodreads and such. Ah, well.

Rating: 1/5

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

I originally received this to review, but have actually bought a copy in the meantime because I took too long about getting to it — and some of my friends were very enthusiastic about it.

I’m actually finding this one a difficult one to review, anyway. The prose is great, and the interweaving of the plots, the character arcs, and the way the different time periods are handled… all of that worked very well for me. The set-up of the world, too: the plague, the way people survive, the existence of something like the Travelling Symphony (though it did remind me of Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique). It just… doesn’t seem to be sticking with me. I finished it last night and I’m already forgetting details and connections.

Maybe part of it is that I didn’t really form an emotional connection to anyone. The way it shifts between central characters caused that, somewhat: I was never sure who was coming back, who was incidental. And sometimes the characters were just… drifting through their lives without purpose. The actor, for example, his hopping between wives and his callousness to his friends; he’s a well-written character, and yet not one I can be passionate about.

I think maybe what it really lacked for me was a sense of destination. “Survival” is all the characters aim for, and there’s no one unifying thing that they’re all drawn toward, so that their coming together feels unimportant. I don’t usually need some big epic event as a book’s climax, but it didn’t seem like this had a climax — it was more a character study, a world study, which normally I would enjoy, but because I didn’t really connect with any of the characters, it didn’t elevate the novel beyond “well, objectively I can see it’s well-written”.

I hesitate over giving it a rating, because I normally rate by enjoyment, but also by a sense of ‘okay, I’ll take a star off for x and y’. I don’t want to dock it stars, though, and yet it doesn’t merit the highest accolades I’ve given to books like The Goblin Emperor. I’m going to have to go with three stars (‘liked it’) — which is not to say it’s not a good book, maybe even a five star book in some ways, but it just can’t touch the involvement I’ve had with books I’ve given five stars.

Rating: 3/5