Starfall

A good 2 hour lecture hidden in this 18 hour book

Revisado: 12-06-23

This is a relatively recent title, so it was surprising to find so much filler that is decades old and of questionable relevance to the current discussion. A couple of hours worth of newish material to ponder, if you can endure the painful rehash of every google entry even remotely related to this topic, not presented just as history, but with the added pleasure of listening to Ball's interpretation of each trivial bit. At length.

Maybe not boring if this is the first book on this topic you have ever read or listened to.

The author's habit of constructing long, convoluted, and digressive sentences didn't combine well with the narrator's style, which tried to emphasize every third or fourth syllable in a kind of singsong that sounds like a mix of a wartime newsreel and an auctioneer.

Works as performance art, I can definitely see having this on at a gallery show, with the right pieces.

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Great, up until the last few chapters....

Revisado: 08-15-20

The world building in this story is outstanding, and the story has some true moments of edge of your seat excitement, but the ending is so bitterly disappointing that it sours the many hours you will have invested to get there. Self righteous PC expository feels grossly out of character in this world, and given the many selfish and even violent acts of self interest that almost every character had indulged in, the many betrayals of trust, you have to wonder if some other hand nudged Mieville's as he drew the story to its concluding lecture, which pulls us out of his world and back into ours. An alien crime, an incomprehensible system of justice, presented throughout the novel as a deep mystery, is turned into a simple and easily condemned evil. No redemption, no hope, just disappointment that such a significant issue is used as a "gotcha" surprise ending.

On a separate note, the narrator was great. I read this book years ago, and had to struggle to make it through some of the drawn out parts where the main character goes on and on with some of his internal monologues, but that was less of an issue with the outstanding performance of Lee. My second trip through this story wasn't much better than the first, but what improvement there was came from his narration.

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