The Endless Vessel

I loved Soule's prior books The Oracle Year and Anyone but this one was kind of a mess. The first part creates a very intriguing setup of a mysterious technology that the main character has to find the origins of, and a strange “plague” spreading all over the world called The Grey (reminiscent of books like Blindness). But then we get an abrupt shift to an overly-long flashback in the whole middle section of the book that reads like a completely different novel. It lost all the pacing from the first part and left me fairly bored, not knowing why I care about any of the newly introduced characters. Finally the third part connected the two stories, but introduces so much new stuff so far into the book that it doesn't get to be explored satisfactorily and ends up with the book ending fairly suddenly.

I wish the book had just kept going with the story from the first part the whole way, and been less all over the place. We didn't get to explore any of the characters very much as a result, and didn't really learn much about the Grey at all. Thus it's unclear what the “point” of it all is. I think the novel would have been significantly improved if it were less packed with stuff and took the time to explore some of it in more depth.

It also suffers from plot holes common to books that just introduce “magic technology” that isn't fully thought through. For example, the ship has amazing technology like some kind of Star Trek energy shield, and yet they don't detect a loaded gun + satellite phone on their security scan (something that even the TSA can probably manage). Additionally it's impossible for a satphone to work inside a ship–it needs an external antenna to work if you are inside of a structure. And it also seems unlikely you could properly aim missiles at a moving ship from a one time coordinate given no additional visual targeting.