JohnO

More of a teen book…

Revisado: 03-27-24

I wanted to like this book. Parts were decent, but overall everything was outweighed by shallow characters, weak plots, and odd interactions.

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Decent, but inconsistent

Revisado: 03-09-24

Some parts were adult sci-fi and some teen. Frequent oversimplifications both technically and personally drew away from a solid plot line. Too many topics tackled for a single book

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Wow

Revisado: 12-12-22

It was an honor to read Failure Mode. Words are really inadequate to describe the book. Thanks.

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Loved this first book. This one was challenging.

Revisado: 01-22-22

The first book showed a lot of promise. The second book can best be described as one long scene where the heroes should die a thousand times over but some one in a million shot continuously saves them over and over and over and over.

Also, the timelines are simply silly. We just got out of being tortured for two months both physically and emotionally to the point of death and insanity. Oh, you rescued us and now we need to go back into the field in four hours. Of course we can.

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Hmmmm

Revisado: 01-12-20

First, the reader. He changed the voice of Arthur, which I liked a lot. He must have forgotten which voice he used in the last book? At several parts of the book, he completely loses track of who is talking (easy to do given the silly, circular context) and the wrong voices are used with the wrong people.

I really liked the first two books. I looked forward to this one, but am unable to say much good. Somehow it seems as though the story was rushed together, yet was still unbearably long in places. I am all for suspending disbelief for SF, however, this goes beyond suspending to a downright power down.

There is a "rifle on the mantle moment" when the governing body, who of course have a history of not make good decisions, debates for mere minutes (impossible for any group of people) to set forth the fate of multiple universes and start literally infinite death and destruction. Listen for that moment, which is totally inconsistent in the story. There is no basis for why they do it, how they manage to come up with something so important (and of course wrong) in three minutes, or any other rationale. For me, that didn't just jump the shark, it jumped ocean filled with sharks.

Spoiler:

The entire book can be summed up with two robots living billions (trillions) of years in an endless loop because some dimwit politician tells a robot to alter it's core programming with seven incredibly long-winded directives that they came up with on the spot. One of those directives is to protect them (an no other humans - uh, that's silly) at all costs. Another is to hide and not be seen (really?). Another one (necessary for the story, but making no sense) is that they cannot improve their technology yet they clearly do. And of course the clincher is to <gulp> never, ever, under any circumstance let those seven hastily assembled complex, silly directives be changed by anyone, including James. Ever. The supposed fact that near infinitely smart AIs had infinite time to analyze the convolutedly long directives and never found an easy loophole out of them was so cobbled together it made me sad. The solution that all of the processing power in the universe came up with - shove everyone into VR and destroy literally everything (yes, I mean everything) in the universe to power that VR and then rinse and repeat the cycle.

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esto le resultó útil a 17 personas

Awesome

Revisado: 10-07-17

Craig - you give new meaning to the word. My only regret is that you don’t have a Skippy to speed up your writing, which by his standards is that of a flea-bitten hairless monkey.

Thanks for the fun.

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I really tried to finish, but couldn't...

Revisado: 08-03-17

What would have made Cadicle better?

Stop the angst and introspection. At first I thought it was just the reader projecting so much indecision and angst. In the end, I realized it was partly the reader but mostly the author.

What was most disappointing about Amy DuBoff’s story?

It's meant for teen to pre-teen, but marketed otherwise.

How could the performance have been better?

Every voice seems like they are worried about everything. "Do you want butter on your pancakes?" is delivered as if someone is offering to cut off an appendage.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Cadicle?

At least 50% of the volume. I listened to it at 2.5x speed and was still bored silly by swaths of negative introspection that went nowhere.

Any additional comments?

The characters are all babies. Grow up the entire lot of them, even the old folks. People, and I would hope even more so people in the future, are not this frail, fragile, and full of self doubt.

Please also analyze the time frames - they are incredibly wacky. The author takes liberty to jump decades, but considers 18 hours of captivity "literally forever".

Every topic builds to a climax that never, not even once, happens.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

200 pages of build-up to:

Problem:
X has been taken by a race that is superior to us in every way (vaguely described how and why) and is in a secure facility that we have never, not once in hundreds of years, even got close to.

Resolution:
"Ok, I'm his dad so I'll go get him with zero planning, one ship, and no idea of how I will get back. Oh, they ended up being sixth-grade stupid and have a lot of infighting. I retrieved him from the other side of the galaxy and got out all within 48 hours using using broken technology with the massively superior enemy actually knowing I'm coming and having already set a trap."

Resolution pages: 5

It's surreal to explain. "We got him, he so stressed at having been away from mommy and daddy for just over 24 hours. We have to really baby him and treat him like an infant in a diaper." Did I mention that this s the most powerful person ever to have live that we are talking about?

It took two volumes to lead up to the main character even existing. After all that wait you'd really want to slap the dude in the face as a wake-up call. There is nothing likable, respectable, or even vaguely interesting about him.

Ok, now I'm upset I even made it through two volumes...

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas