Armada, Ernest Cline

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date was 16th July 2015

I thought this was going to be amazing. As you can see from the fact that I didn’t get round to finishing and reviewing it until now, it definitely fell short of my expectations. It felt like it tried to take the plot of Ender’s Game and tie in the nostalgia of Ready Player One, but it just… didn’t read as authentically geeky in quite the same way. Where I found Ready Player One charming, I ended up rolling my eyes. And I didn’t find any of the characters particularly interesting.

And while I may not be a big fan of Orson Scott Card as a person for his stated opinions about various topics, I think Ender’s Game was better structured and had more to say.

But now I want to reread Ready Player One and see if I still enjoy that as much.

Rating: 2/5

Slade House, David Mitchell

I want to enjoy Mitchell’s books, but it annoys me that they’re all connected. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s how I feel all the same; it seems so consciously literary and over clever, in many of the cases. Granted, I’ve only read this and Cloud Atlas, but I’ve seen a chart. A chart, for goodness’ sake. So I was a bit annoyed when reading this, because I came to the phrase ‘the bone clocks’, a reference to the title of another of Mitchell’s books. I don’t want to have to read all your supposedly stand-alone books to understand all your characters!

Pet peeves aside, the different voices were interesting, though not always as distinct as I’d like. I figured out the “mystery” of it pretty fast, and thus wasn’t surprised by things which rather surprised the characters themselves — the trouble of having seen it happen to another character before them, I guess. There’s a creepy atmosphere about the book, though that works best in the earlier sections: later, I’ve got too good an idea of where things are going.

It was fairly absorbing, but if it had been much longer I might have got bored. There’s only so many cycles you can go through before it all becomes rather obvious, and repetitive to boot.

Rating: 3/5

The Litany of Earth, Ruthanna Emrys

You can read this novella online here, and it’s good background to have if you’re interested in reading Emrys’ novel, Winter Tide. It helps orientate you and figure out the characters, how they’re related, what they care about, where they’ve been. I paused in reading Winter Tide to read this, and it definitely clarified things. In fact, I liked it more than Winter Tide: it felt better paced, perhaps because it does have to have a beginning, middle and end in a fairly short stretch of words.

It’s beautifully written, as well; both this and Winter Tide are excellent reworkings of Lovecraft’s ideas concerning the Deep Ones, taking away a lot of the horror he held and expressed about anything Other. It stands alone well, even though it serves as a good introduction for Winter Tide. It’s definitely a good way to dip into Emrys’ work to see if you like her style and ideas.

Rating: 4/5

Invisible Planets, ed. Ken Liu

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date was 1st November 2016

It took me a while to get through this, as I found the tone of the stories rather same-y. I don’t know if that’s because of the translator (because granted, I had the same impression of Cixin Liu’s work in the novels Ken Liu translated). But it’s a great survey of Chinese science fiction and it’s well worth the read; I don’t remember well enough what I’d pick out now from the beginning of the book, but there’s quite a breadth of choice here. There’s usually several stories by each author, to give you a good taste of what’s out there.

The thing I find really often with novels in translation that the translation somehow deadens the feeling, and I found that quite a lot here. Maybe having different translators would’ve helped, I don’t know. I think that’s really where it didn’t work for me — which is a shame, because it’s a pretty awesome collection in other ways, but this was my main impression.

Rating: 3/5