Charlie G.

This book needed an editor

Revisado: 01-30-21

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is one of the most poorly written novels I’ve ever tried to slog through. I admittedly failed. By chapter 29 I was so bored and frustrated that I couldn’t go on.

If I had to describe it, I’d say this novel seems like it was written by an AI that only had a library of young adult fiction and a book on theoretical physics as a reference. Additionally, the characters were so bland and emotionless that an outside observer could reasonably assume they were pod people.

The story would only spend brief periods on the rather interesting scientific concepts then long painful interludes into the personal lives of the main characters. To be clear though, it wasn’t any of the engaging parts of their personal lives. Just things like making dinner and drinking coffee, with unrealistic sounding dialog scattered throughout. Actual human beings don’t interact the way this author portrayed them.

The attempts at exposition were possibly the most ridiculous parts. Listening to the characters explain concepts as if they were just reading from a technical manual was almost painful. For instance, I doubt the average reader needs to know (or cares about) the benefits of scripting in Python.

Much of this novel could have been trimmed out to make it more palatable. There were entire chapters which could have been condensed to a single paragraph or just removed entirely. Even then, it wouldn’t fix the wooden characters and bad storytelling.

As if that weren’t bad enough, I think the author was trying to build a romance subplot. I don’t know for sure because it was more like listening to two robots discuss the concept of emotions without having ever experienced them.

I’m not sure why there are so many positive reviews for this novel. Maybe it gets much better after chapter 29, but I doubt it.

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Interesting science hampered by poor writing

Revisado: 01-13-21

I enjoyed some of the concepts being introduced by each of the Quantum Series novels. But I found the writing to be distractingly bad.

The behavior of some the characters was occasionally ridiculous, sometimes to the degree of satire. Several male characters repeatedly said and did things that made me cringe. The female characters were worse, being portrayed as either mildly hysterical or fawning over the male lead. Frankly, it came across as if the author rarely interacts with women on a professional basis.

Though I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to imagine travel between higher dimensional space, I couldn’t suspend my belief about the dialog. I kept thinking to myself, “Real people don’t act like that”. This is even taking into consideration the eccentricities often found among people in STEM.

The most jarring thing for me was what I can only assume is the author’s issues with women. He kept describing the attractiveness of several of the women, and by the third novel I noticed that the targets of those assessments tended to be people of differing ethnicities from the male lead. It started to sound a little like when white men fetishize “exotic” women.

I tried to ignore the problematic gender issues, a skill learned while being an avid reader of early 20th century science fiction. However, the beginning of Quantum Time focused heavily on the perspective of the male lead, who was previously the main source of these “opinions”. This included a scene describing his Haitian-American girlfriend’s nude body very early on the book.

I eventually just gave up and never finished the third book. The need to keep reminding the reader that the male lead was regularly having sex rapidly moved from silly to somewhat annoying. I kept wanting the author to just go ahead and write whatever gratuitous sex scene he had in his head so that he could move on to the actual plot.

The other aspect of the novels that was distracting to me was the random inclusion of social commentary. It wasn’t the content of that commentary, but the unnatural pauses in the story to explain them. It reminded me of conversations I’ve had with baby boomers after they’ve learned about some cultural or historical information that is totally foreign to them, but is common knowledge to most people. Usually it would result in the sidetracking of another topic with, “Oh! Did you know...” in a tone of either excitement or incredulity.

In summary, I really like the framework for the stories. The author clearly has an understanding of the science portion of the writing. He just needs to work on the fiction part.

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Great narration, some problematic characters

Revisado: 01-02-21

First, let me say that I genuinely enjoyed the attempt to mimic the style of Douglas Adams, and Croshaw does a fantastic job at narration. He’s great at delivering the dry humor which is the framework of this story.

My biggest complaint is his portrayal of women in the book. Though he espouses the concept of gender equality more than once, the actual female characters are a bit problematic. They only seem to come in three categories: Stupid and ditzy, shrill and mean, whiny and adolescent.

To be fair, all the characters, regardless of gender, were written in such a way as to make them somewhat unlikeable. However, Croshaw seemed intent on making some of the most unpleasant characters female. One in particular was an unapologetic jerk throughout the entire novel, with the main character being the primary target of her ire. Her implied attraction to him near the end of the book only made it worse.

Overall, this was a silly story which did a decent job of satirizing numerous sci-fi and action/adventure tropes. A good book, except for the one major flaw mentioned above. I hesitate to recommend it unless you’re very curious or just a big fan of Yahtzee Croshaw’s other works.

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Great performance of an underwhelming story

Revisado: 01-06-19

After having read The Time Ships, I had high hopes for another sequel to a classic H. G. Wells novel. Stephen Baxter had proven that he could take that material and extend the premise into a more contemporary sci-fi story.

Imagine my disappointment when I could barely get through the first few chapters.

The plot wasn’t very compelling and the characters all seemed wooden and weren’t relatable. The pacing was also strangely inconsistent for a Stephen Baxter novel. Perhaps that was his attempt to mimic the narration of the novel’s predecessor.

The worst part for me was its bizarre mishmash of the limited Victorian scientific understanding and more modern 20th century technology. I found it very difficult to suspend my disbelief when the story necessitated a simplistic view of cosmology while also applying modern scientific principles.

The War of the Worlds is at least consistent in it’s world building because Wells was working exclusively with a 19th century understanding of physics and biology.

With his sequel to The Time Machine, Baxter explained the events of the previous novel by integrating it with principles of quantum physics. The main character’s assumptions about his discovery are proven wrong as he is introduced to more modern scientific knowledge.

This book instead tries to remain true to H. G. Wells’ vision, while also trying to be hard science fiction. The result is a world that doesn’t make much sense.

On top of that, the ending was just silly. I won’t spoil it, but I will say the conclusion to War of the Worlds is far superior in my opinion.

This novel is probably one of my least favorite from Stephen Baxter. It’s an interesting concept, but I wish he had written it more like his other H. G Wells tribute.

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Interesting stories but bad audio quality.

Revisado: 01-06-19

Overall, I enjoyed most, though not all, of the stories. One or two weren’t necessarily what I would consider “Hard” science fiction, but weren’t bad nonetheless.

My only major complaint is that the audio for all the stories narrated by Nancy Linari sounds like it was compressed too much. Her voice was distorted and barely understandable. There were numerous times I had to rewind and crank up the volume just to understand some words or phrases she was saying.

It was especially jarring when it switched back to Tom Dheere. His audio was very clear. It was as if they were from two different audio books entirely.

I probably wouldn’t recommend this purchase simply because the quality of the stories doesn’t make up for the frustrating sound issues.

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What did I just listen to?

Revisado: 04-20-18

First, let me say that had I not been stuck in my car, I would have stopped listening after the first hour.

In addition to the handful of mildly racist and misogynistic moments in the novel, the writing was not very sophisticated. I assume that this is a first time author.

None of the characters were relatable or even interesting. A few were introduced as if they were going to be important to the story and then never mentioned again. The ones who remained behaved like robots trying to emulate human behavior and mannerisms... poorly.

This was not helped by the fact that the reader sounded like an automated voice from a GPS. Mostly flat affect, with the occasional odd inflection on a word. If I’d been told that this was Google’s latest attempt at voice synthesis I would have easily believed it.

The one saving grace is that the story, though ludicrous, was mildly interesting. Strangely enough, the futuristic science was the most believable part. The politics, action, and romance was silly at best and totally unrealistic at worst.

Unfortunately, the story ends abruptly, presumably in attempt to hook the reader/listener into buying the next one in the series which is announced by the author at the end (No, thanks!). This fit perfectly with the inconsistent pacing and unnecessary side stories, which had virtually no impact on the plot.

There are plenty of other cheesy sci-fi novels out there that are way more entertaining than this one. Read or listen to one of those instead.

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