Thomas Nevins

Normally I just post links to my blog reviews, but as this is an Early Reviewer book, I feel obliged to make this review as handy as possible. Regrettably, that means everyone will find out that this book is one of the absolute worst things I've ever read. (Note: I will append links to blog posts about this book as they appear.)

Now, I've hated other books before, but I don't think I have, in the last ten years, read a book cover-to-cover that was quite so inept as this one. I don't hardly even know where to start.

I'll try to start with kindness, viz. the only rather good line in the entire book: "The Conglomerates might try to strip the elderly of their dignity, but dignity was a quality that had eluded the Conglomerates and hindered their ability to control the words of the dignified."

Pretty good line. Too bad it's surrounded by abominations like "They were determined to see a future--for the babies." and "Nice trick with the shower though. You really outsmarted him." and "She gave Aunty a hug, which demonstrated their difference in body type."

I don't even know where to start with sentences like those. Let alone an entire book full of them. As part of a 500-word spoof, they would be fine, but this book takes itself a little too seriously for that kind of ballast.

I'm amazed and astounded this is being published by a major house, even if the author is an employee of said house.

Anyway, this is a dystopian novel, (fine), except dystopias seem to attract writers who never read speculative fiction. Now, I'm not out to defend SF as a seamless bastion of great writing, but, as a genre, it's been around long enough to iron out some of the boneheaded errors that its pioneers made. This book does not benefit from the last hundred years of trial and error and makes some of the shameless errors one might associate with a 50s pulp paperback.

For instance. This book takes place in 2048. So a person in the first part of middle age would have been a teenager, when, 2028? Close enough. Even if it were 2018 this would still be a good example.

So a character finds her old laptop, a heavy clunker that sounds straight out of 1994. It even has a dialup modem! Can you imagine! That screeches! And, when she finds this laptop, she uses it to log into an email account she hasn't accessed in years because.....it's on her laptop!

Or consider the golf courses some late-in-the-book characters use because that's where the water is. They've been abandoned, you see, so there's all this water just sitting around. Right. In Arizona.

Naturally, the golf course we see is accompanied by palatial homes and a strip mine, because the mine honchos want to live and golf right next to their huge hole in the ground.

Sigh.

I wish there were good things I could say about this book. And I guess there are. The author knows the form of the thriller. But knowing form does not a good book make. I laughed in disbelief at this book regularly. I kept starting other books to avoid going back to this one. If it hadn't been my first ER book, I would not have finished it. It's a total disaster.

There is, somewhere, maybe, a good book in here, but finding it would require scrapping the whole thing and starting over. Clever names, for instance, like Coots and Dyscards (which the author is obviously quite proud of), are very difficult to accept as plausible. Constant exposition displaces storytelling. The whole thing is just.....

Yeah. I think I've said enough.

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links:
http://thmazing.blogspot.com/2008/05/if-people-werent-so-stupid-we-wouldnt.html
http://thmazing.blogspot.com/2008/05/9th5of08.html#suckytime… (mais)

Don’t get old, we’ll ship you out west. Don’t become a burden or embarrassment for your parents, they’ll trade you in for a new child, a better one. This is the world in the Age of the Conglomerates, and it’s about to come crumbling down.

So, basically it was just o.k. Not that I didn’t like it, the ideas were pretty decent and the characters were decent, it just felt rushed. First of all, too much was given away in the prologue. For a dystopian novel, which is what this one felt like it was trying to be, too much was spoon fed to me. It probably would have been better if the reader was allowed to discover some of the structure of this weird future on their own. Other than that, it just felt incredibly rushed, especially towards the end when everything started coming together. I’d be interested to see the next book by this guy, because his ideas are nice, but the expression needs some work.… (mais)

NOTE: I reviewed this book about a year ago, but when I tried to move the book using the collections feature it totally disappeared, along with the review, and I had to add it back to my library.

I received this as an ER book. I'm certain the author was well intentioned, and the book has an interesting premise. Unfortunely, I believe the book is being published prematurely. There is too much "telling not showing", awkward writing, and the plot wanders around with too many loose ends for my tastes. Not every work will be a writer's best and I could easily see this story being revised in time. Even the best known authors have released substantially retold tales and this would be a candidate - decent idea in need of some polish.… (mais)