Overarching concept is good: people 200 years in future able to
interact with people in present day through an advanced drone, and have
been able to send a very advanced artificial intelligence back which ends
up driving the story along almost autonomously.
The execution is awful, especially the pacing. Far too much
unnecessary detail and far too much going on which doesn’t advance the
story. The movie-making trick of skipping ahead in time needs to be
learned. Further, I failed to understand the point of the plot entirely:
it was supposed to be about avoiding a nuclear war, but that features
scantily in the prose but for the occasional tangential reference.
To make things worse, the book is organised into 110 chapters, very
many of which are less than a full page of text. Each change in chapter
represents a change in scene. This is incredibly tedious.
Just as with Neuromancer, this book deserves a second reading
in order to gain a proper appreciation of the story, but that just ain’t
going to happen.
Can only give this a very low re-read factor. |
