SK
This is the second Stephen Baxter novel I've read. I really enjoyed The Thousand Earths. This one, not so much. Some neat ideas but I never felt engaged in the story. It mostly follows the generation ship tropes and cliches with some pretty weird stuff thrown. The Raft isn't a generation ship but it functions like one for all intents and purposes. It just felt like it didn't do those tropes very well. And the weird bits seemed thrown in just to be weird.
This was one of Baxter's earliest works so I'm not dissuaded from giving him another shot down the road.
This is the first full Stephen King novel I've read. Despite its length (nearly 1,000 pages) I never felt bored. The story isn't particularly fast paced either. Just something about King's writing style. I understand now why he's one of the bestselling authors of all time. I think this book was hovering around 4 stars until the final handful of pages. I shed more than a few tears at that ending.
I liked this book a lot. Its a much better book than my first Hogan novel (Thrice Upon a Time). A human skeleton is found on the moon, but its 50,000 years old. The book is the story of slowly unraveling the mystery of how it got there. Some cool ideas that I didn't expect. Looking forward to the rest of the books in the series.
I devoured this book in just a few days. I've not read anything quite like it before. I do wish the book spent a little more time ‘in the trenches' so to speak. It focuses entirely on the relatively high up officers which is great for giving a good idea of the flow of the battle but it does mostly gloss over the brutality of the battle.
Really interesting world building. In fact, some of the most intriguing world building I've read since probably Hyperion. I do think some of the world building devolves into listing things a bit too often. Things that don't every really get explained and are just there to make you think the world is complex. Like he will list 14 names of pilots that did important stuff but you only learn about one of them. Or will list 10 different castes/classes/jobs (whatever they are called in universe) with no explanation of what 8 of them are. Some amount of this can be very effective. It adds mystery. But the author overdoes it a bit. Even late in the book you will see lists of heretofore unmentioned things with little bearing on the storing. I really liked the piloting parts. Really unique idea. The main character is often annoying and arrogant, but intentionally so. We are supposed to be frustrated by him. The caveman part was OK, but was a bit too long. Overall, very enjoyable but could do with some editing and maybe 100 fewer pages.
Another improvement over the previous entry. The time jump didn't bother me at all like it did for some other reviewers. There is very little that makes the time jump apparent. The author just tells us the crew is older and they ache some and they have grey hair. But beyond that, its still the same crew. More action in this book than previous two and the space fascist bad guys are interesting. I have high hopes for the final two books in the series.
I quite liked the opening of the book. For me it fell apart a bit when he makes the underground railroad and actual underground railroad. Each individual portion was quite engaging and often horrifying. But The effort to force of this to happen to the same character didn't work for me. I think this book would have worked better as a collection of short stories and novelettes about different characters experience different forms of racism across the US.
I think somewhere around the time the cop has a martial arts battle with his mistress is where I started to realize this book was not for me. I stuck it out for a while after but I found that I just was not really intrigued by any of the mystery and the action was a little too much like a bad 80s movie. I think this book will actually work for a lot of people. It isn't really ‘bad'. It's just not for me at all.
One of my favorite new reads of the 2023. Not perfect, but I do find myself randomly thinking about it from time to time. Its the first Baxter I've read, and I hear that some of the themes in this book are ground he's already tread on before. But for me, it was all new. Really liked it and will certainly be seeking out more Baxter in the future.
This is technically a reread, but I remember almost nothing about this book except for some vague and unimportant scenes about 2/3 through the book. I really loved this book. Its so slow, but I loved his prose and didn't mind the slow build.
My biggest complaint is that many of the characters feel non-distinct. Miriamele and Maegwin feel like the same person. I couldn't tell you who Guthwilf, Fengbald and Isgrimnur are and what role they have in the story and what the differences are between the lands they come from as they just sort of blend together. Other characters are obviously quite distinct like Binibik, Geloe, Josua and Elias.
A perfect 5. Nothing particularly bad about this book, but nothing particularly great about it either. The best bits are when the scientists are sort of geeking out trying to understand the rules of the time travel they've discovered. Everything else is pretty meh. This novel probably could have been very good if it was 150 pages instead of 350.
Oh boy, where to even start with this book. It's not good. Spoilers below. But my advice is to just read the spoilers and skip the book.
The story is a sort of a modern reimagining of Beowolf set on mankind's first colony on another planet. The colony is composed of 200 individuals who are put into a cryo-sleep for the voyage except for Cadman, our main character. Cadman is the typical grizzled war veteran. He stayed awake during the voyage (or maybe just had a lot less sleep time, I forget). It turns out that when you wake up from long term cryo-sleep it can have effects on your brain. For most that are affected, it just makes them a little bit less sharp than they were before, a little more forgetful, a little slower to work through problems. This comes into play because its makes the colonists miss some connections that would have made their situation a hundred times better. A little convenient for the author, but seems plausible enough so I let this one slide. A few of the colonists can't be woken at all and one was awakened but with severe mental disabilities.
The colony is on a large island, and is doing great for the first 6 months or so. Planting crops, breeding chickens, cows, horses and dogs. Cadman keeps saying “Guys, something bad is gonna happen, I just know it.” And colonists are like, “Dude, shut up and chill out. Its fine.” Obviously things go bad. A giant animal that is something like a komodo dragon the size of a hippo with the tail of a stegosaurus shows up, eats a baby, wreaks havoc and kills several colonists. The beast is eventually killed.. The animal can move insanely fast. They never give exact numbers or anything, but like blindingly fast. The Achilles heel of the creature is that it has to turn on its ‘speed' using some type of oxidizing gland that is the equivalent of shooting jet fuel into the bloodstream. But when its using its ‘speed', its body super heats. So it can only use it for a short time before it has to find some water to cool off in. Afterwards, Cadman, upset that they didn't listen to him sooner, takes off like an 8 year who didn't get his way and makes a house halfway up a mountain. Mary Ann, who for some reason is madly in love with Cadman follows him up there and he's a super dick to her. But she sticks around because she so in love with him and wants to be near him even if he doesn't love her back and maybe if she is a good housewife he will actually fall in love with her.
After a few months of Cadman sulking, the colonists eventually grovel at his feet enough to convince him to come back to the main colony. But surprise surprise there are more of the beast, called “grendels” now. A couple more people die. They go out and hunt down a dozen or so of the grendels and kill them. Now the colony is presumably safe as they've eliminated all of them. But then it turns out that the native fish are actually tadpole versions of the grendels. And the grendels actually eat their own babys if there isn't enough food. The baby grendels eat algae and plants, which the full grown grendels can't. Then the full grown grendels eat the baby grendels. So it creates a sort of stable population where only a dozen or so full grown grendels can exist on the island at any one time. When the colonists killed the adult grendels, they weren't around to eat the baby grendels and then there is an enormous explosion of the grendel population. Thousands instead of a dozen. The colonists make their stand and eventually win through a combination of blowing up hundreds of them with mines, the grendels eating each other, and them over heating when they get too far from a water source.
Throughout all of this there is a weird love trapezoid or pentagon that was just unbearable. Two women love Cadman because he's Mr. Macho. But one of them, Sylvia, is already married so her and Cadman just have these awkwardly inappropriate conversations because they aren't allowed to get together. But boy does Sylvia think Cadman is great, despite him telling her husband that he isn't man enough for Sylvia and just being a big douche in general. Mary Ann is head over heels for Cadman, also because he is Mr. Macho. She also knows Cadman would rather be with Sylvia but maybe if she just tries hard enough... At one point she even thinks to herself that maybe she should let Cadman and Sylvia sleep together just so Cadman can get it out of his system. Then Sylvia's husband gets paralyzed so he gives her permission to have sex with someone else as long as its not Cadman. So she starts having sex with Cadman's best friend Carlos (who speaks Spanish, but not really?) but still wants Cadman, and everyone knows it. Right up until the very last page Sylvia is thinking to herself, “I sure wish this baby I am having were Cadman's baby.”
I only finished this book because I had heard the final confrontation was really tense and exciting. It was fine. Not great, but not bad. The action is the only somewhat decent part of the book. The main character is unbearable. I think at the start of the book you are supposed to kind of think he is a jerk. But I think by the end you are supposed to actually like him because he is such a man's man but he's still an asshole. The romance subplots are just awful and unnecessary. I usually like Niven and Pournelle. Most of the time I can get past the sexism that always finds its way into their books and enjoy the story. But I just couldn't with this one, it was just constantly shoved in your face.
The best I can say about the book is that maaaaaybe if you make this a 100 page novella without any of the interpersonal drama you'd have an OK but forgettable story.
I'm sure there are worse books out there, but I haven't read one.
Really strong opening. I like Moon's prose. After the first 1/3, the story loses all of its steam. I understand its intended to convey the viewpoint of a military grunt who doesn't know much abut the overall battle. They can only see what's happening right in front of them. But this makes it a bit boring. The training parts at the beginning and the parts where Paks is running through the woods to warn the rest of the army are the best parts of the book. I'll likely return to this series at some point as there was certainly enough good here that I have hope the final two books will improve on the first since she is no longer in the army.