Kevin Smathers

Not even worth the free download

Revisado: 10-31-23

Cute concept but far too much farce and not nearly enough story. The novel becomes bogged down under the weight of its own absurdity losing track of anything story like in favor of monotonously mocking every John Hughes film.

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Entertaining and illuminating

Revisado: 07-10-18

Dan Brown's writing inevitably draws you into the story beginning with his very personable Professor Langdon, and through the slowly building suspense. I chose this book for easy entertainment after getting bogged down by a series of bad purchases with unlikable protagonists motivated by puerile concerns. So I chose this for entertainment value, but ended up getting more than I bargained for.

The plot, the science backing it, and the well described but not belabored setting all made this more rewarding than I had expected based on the only other Dan Brown book I have read: "The Da Vinci Code". In the previous work the plot holes surrounding the motivations of the character who was revealed as the primary antagonist left me unsatisfied with the ending although the journey was entertaining enough. In this book the author does a much better job of tying the pieces together, and the descriptions of art, locations, history, and speculative science all contrive to make it the best read I've found in weeks.

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Enjoyable yarn well performed

Revisado: 10-09-17

but juvenile character traits and seemingly random plot devices make this feel like a D&D campaign being made up on the fly.

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More horror than sf

Revisado: 10-06-17

Nonstop violence and cruelty throughout with a trivial story to weave it together. And despite endless maundering over the role of ethics when society collapses, there is also no character growth to speak of.

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A sense of body disassociation

Revisado: 08-28-14

My initial read through of the novel was Wil Wheaton's excellent performance, but I have just started listening to Amber Benson's interpretation which leads me to some oddly disassociative feelings.

Throughout Wil's reading I assumed that the first person narrator was male. The premise of the story makes the narrator's actual sex irrelevant, and to my memory, undiscussed. Even so I find that my association of male with the protagonist is so strong that restarting the novel with a female reader instills a strange feeling of body disassociation, somewhat akin to the primary plot element of the novel.

I am left wondering if there were indications one way or the other that I have forgotten, or if the novel can be read equally well from either perspective, or if the author's intent was all along to make the sex of the protagonist be immaterial.

Very strange.

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Tedious

Revisado: 03-19-14

Writing a novel from the perspective of a Community is an incredibly difficult undertaking. The result makes me feel schizophrenic. Or maybe it is just that there is no story here. A group of young women were thrown into close proximity with one another under trying circumstances at the insistence of husbands and government, and lived for a couple of years before departing. Along the way they may have given birth to a community. Or maybe not. Either way they had to come away from the experience with the sudden realization that their husbands had invented the most destructive weapon known to man.

One gets occasional insights of the time and the place, the limits they were willing to accept in the name of a nation at war, the sexual tension that underlies all human communities. The need to connect with one another. But because the story doesn't follow any of the community members closely enough to make them into people, it is very difficult to feel what they felt.

2 stars for the history lesson. 1 (or zero) for the story which is AWOL. The performance is ok if a bit sing-song given the lack of a narrative that binds the reader to what she is reading.

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A Bleakly Plausible End of the World Story

Revisado: 10-22-13

This is the first time I've encountered Forstchen, and overall I recommend this novel. It contains an interesting mix of strategy, apocalyptic future, and family, with perhaps the barest fringes of romance thrown in for good measure.

There are several other plotlines that are given teasers but never fleshed out, and it seems to me almost as though the author became disenchanted with his own work and decided to cut it short.

The story comes to a very brief conclusion that runs counter to most of the foreshadowing, and curtails what seemed like a much longer story arc nearer the beginning. For example Forstchen goes into extravagant detail about a piece of gold jewelry that his daughter is given at the beginning of the book, presumably with the intention of exploring metals as hard currency in the post-apocalyptic world that the character ends up in. What we are left with is pretty depressing, all of the death and destruction, but none of the postwar renaissance and indomitable human spirit that draws victory from the ashes of failure. Here the victory is bare survival, which is pretty bleak indeed.

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Long

Revisado: 08-24-13

What disappointed you about Existence?

This is the first time that a David Brin story has left me bored for practically the entire journey. Mr. Brin decided to try his hand at Science Fiction set in a strictly Einstein conforming Universe.

In itself that isn't such a bad idea, but the story simply plods along too many plot threads few of which hold any really interesting developments. It also feels bizarrely as if Mr. Brin was trying to leave an opening to tie this universe into his Uplift series, but as interesting as some of the backfilled story could be, there are occasional references to uplift activities which have only a peripheral relationship to the central plot and have no challenges to overcome within the story line making it unclear why they are there at all.

Toward the end of the book it feels as if Mr. Brin got bored with what he was writing. The timeline moves painfully slowly through the first two thirds of the book, then fast forwards years at a time toward the end as we get a quick summary of the results of events set in motion earlier. This too is disappointing.

Instead of telling stories of endless conniving by aristrocratically entitled idiots (among other plotlines), why not tell us about the debates that allowed humans to actually decide their future. Instead of telling us the story of how we managed to find a path out of the difficulties we were facing, the eventual success of human civilization is entirely gobbled up as fait accompli by the summary chapters that form the conclusion.

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Vastly Overrated, Schizophrenic, and Clumsy

Revisado: 02-16-13

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

The leading misfeature is the plot in which the heroine jumps frenetically between baseless overconfidence and irrational despair. As the plot developed I found myself hoping, even assuming that there must be some point of redemption where she actually tests herself and learns something, but I was disappointed in this as well.

A much better version of the story of the spoiled kid to grows beyond his childish youth can be found in Kipling's "Captains Courageous". As for "Fated," I'm mostly disappointed that anyone saw fit to publish something so pointless.

How could the performance have been better?

I'm not usually sensitive to reading styles, but the voice actor in this case does help to knock the general failure of the story out of the park. Her delivery is so earnest (while the protagonist is being so obtuse) that I found myself losing suspension of disbelief on a nearly constant basis.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Some of the descriptions of native American ritual and beliefs are interesting. I don't know if they are accurate, but they are at least interesting. And occasionally the author's description of the story setting hits a good fantasy note; but again all of these have been done better by other authors. Garth Nix for example paints a much more interesting and believable picture of the netherworld in my opinion.

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