Movie Bait
Mar. 14th, 2013 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJul 2012
The Recollection - Gareth L Powers - Solaris, 2011
* * *
A few years ago I faced the problem that all bibliophiles of modest means eventually encounter, which is what to do when your bookshelves approach capacity. I started with the traditional one-in, one-out policy (only keep a book if it replaces another), but this has now reached the stage where pretty much all the books I have are ones that I want to read again. Various shelf strategies (moving all DVDs and knick-knacks into drawers, double-stacking) have delayed the inevitable, but now it is getting to the stage where I am seriously beginning to think about moving to a larger house (there's still the loft, but mine is very small and it’s wrong to keep books in the cold). As another stop-gap, I have acquired an e-reader. It's a nice little machine - the print is clear and it was a piece of cake to set up - but the difficulty of riffling back to earlier sections to remind yourself of previous events (made more irksome by the lack of page numbers) means that I can only envisage using it for lighter reading. And this book would have been perfect for it.
That's not to say that it is bad. It is a perfectly decent space opera with planet-destroying baddies, wormholes and spaceships, very reminiscent of Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise. But like that book, it suffers from the twin Hollywood flaws of shallow characterisation and sacrifice of motivational plausibility to advance the plot.
The story begins in contemporary London where Ed Rico, an unsuccessful artist, sees his brother Verne fall into a glowing purple arch that appears on the down escalator of Embankment station, following an argument in which it transpires that Ed has been having an affair with Verne's wife Alice. When Verne does not return, Ed vows to find him and enlists Alice's help. Meanwhile, in the 24th century, a down-on-her-luck spaceship pilot called Katherine Abdulov gets a job transporting a young scholar and an Acolyte to a crystal spaceship built by the mysterious alien race known as the Dho. She also has a mission from her family to get to a planet called Djatt before her trading rival (and ex-lover) Victor Luciano.
No SF-literate reader will be remotely surprised to learn that the arch is part of a wormhole portal network (what else was it likely to be?), but there is one really nice new idea, which is that wormhole travel still obeys Einstein's law that information cannot move faster than the speed of light. So travelling to a planet 50 light years distant and back seems instantaneous to the traveller but takes 100 years in the timescale of the place they left behind. Spaceships, which use a portable form of the arch technology, function in a similar manner. The concept is nicely thought through and the obvious questions (like why the arches all happen to lead to planets with human-compatible atmospheres) are answered.
My main problem was with the characters, who are rather simplistic and do not react convincingly to some of the plot developments. For example, on discovering that they have travelled so far that they will never see the families and friends they left on earth again, their response is essentially to shrug and carry on. There is also more than a hint of Hollywood writing in the clear delineation of the characters' goals. So much so that I suspect that this book is deliberate movie bait.
And maybe it’s my elder brother neuroses coming out again, but I found it very hard to warm to Ed as much as I was supposed to. Like Justinus in the Falco series, he comes across to me as thoroughly irresponsible, wet and morally flawed, his occasional heroic acts seem out of keeping, and I don’t understand why the other characters seem to like him so much. Katherine is better, but suffers from the characterisation fault that I call "weathercocking", the tendency of male writers to portray women as changing their minds for no good reason. In this case it is in the service of the plot, but that is no excuse. Alice is simply underwritten - we get no sense of her inner life and she does little more than act as a motivation for Ed.
The plot is fine but not strikingly original and is let down by the Dho, who behave as stereotypical inscrutable aliens until necessary plot points need to made clear. There is a distinct whiff of Deus Ex Machina in the ending.
Despite all the negatives, this is competent SF with a sense of scale and a coherent background. However, I do not think it has earned its place on my physical bookshelves.
The Recollection - Gareth L Powers - Solaris, 2011
* * *
A few years ago I faced the problem that all bibliophiles of modest means eventually encounter, which is what to do when your bookshelves approach capacity. I started with the traditional one-in, one-out policy (only keep a book if it replaces another), but this has now reached the stage where pretty much all the books I have are ones that I want to read again. Various shelf strategies (moving all DVDs and knick-knacks into drawers, double-stacking) have delayed the inevitable, but now it is getting to the stage where I am seriously beginning to think about moving to a larger house (there's still the loft, but mine is very small and it’s wrong to keep books in the cold). As another stop-gap, I have acquired an e-reader. It's a nice little machine - the print is clear and it was a piece of cake to set up - but the difficulty of riffling back to earlier sections to remind yourself of previous events (made more irksome by the lack of page numbers) means that I can only envisage using it for lighter reading. And this book would have been perfect for it.
That's not to say that it is bad. It is a perfectly decent space opera with planet-destroying baddies, wormholes and spaceships, very reminiscent of Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise. But like that book, it suffers from the twin Hollywood flaws of shallow characterisation and sacrifice of motivational plausibility to advance the plot.
The story begins in contemporary London where Ed Rico, an unsuccessful artist, sees his brother Verne fall into a glowing purple arch that appears on the down escalator of Embankment station, following an argument in which it transpires that Ed has been having an affair with Verne's wife Alice. When Verne does not return, Ed vows to find him and enlists Alice's help. Meanwhile, in the 24th century, a down-on-her-luck spaceship pilot called Katherine Abdulov gets a job transporting a young scholar and an Acolyte to a crystal spaceship built by the mysterious alien race known as the Dho. She also has a mission from her family to get to a planet called Djatt before her trading rival (and ex-lover) Victor Luciano.
No SF-literate reader will be remotely surprised to learn that the arch is part of a wormhole portal network (what else was it likely to be?), but there is one really nice new idea, which is that wormhole travel still obeys Einstein's law that information cannot move faster than the speed of light. So travelling to a planet 50 light years distant and back seems instantaneous to the traveller but takes 100 years in the timescale of the place they left behind. Spaceships, which use a portable form of the arch technology, function in a similar manner. The concept is nicely thought through and the obvious questions (like why the arches all happen to lead to planets with human-compatible atmospheres) are answered.
My main problem was with the characters, who are rather simplistic and do not react convincingly to some of the plot developments. For example, on discovering that they have travelled so far that they will never see the families and friends they left on earth again, their response is essentially to shrug and carry on. There is also more than a hint of Hollywood writing in the clear delineation of the characters' goals. So much so that I suspect that this book is deliberate movie bait.
And maybe it’s my elder brother neuroses coming out again, but I found it very hard to warm to Ed as much as I was supposed to. Like Justinus in the Falco series, he comes across to me as thoroughly irresponsible, wet and morally flawed, his occasional heroic acts seem out of keeping, and I don’t understand why the other characters seem to like him so much. Katherine is better, but suffers from the characterisation fault that I call "weathercocking", the tendency of male writers to portray women as changing their minds for no good reason. In this case it is in the service of the plot, but that is no excuse. Alice is simply underwritten - we get no sense of her inner life and she does little more than act as a motivation for Ed.
The plot is fine but not strikingly original and is let down by the Dho, who behave as stereotypical inscrutable aliens until necessary plot points need to made clear. There is a distinct whiff of Deus Ex Machina in the ending.
Despite all the negatives, this is competent SF with a sense of scale and a coherent background. However, I do not think it has earned its place on my physical bookshelves.