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Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport
Mar. 29th, 2020 02:24 pmMedusa Uploaded
3/5. On a generation ship, a "worm" – a member of the working class whose senses and bodies can be controlled by the executive elites – discovers technological secrets and becomes the leader of an insurgency. Also a lot of assassinations.
This has its emotional satisfactions, but there's a lot more zeal here than skill. The author seems to have one structural trick to build tension – beginning with our narrator in an airlock about to be spaced, then flashing back to explain how she got there – and she deploys it over . . . and over . . . and over. Which is funny since this book actually has very little tension. It's punctured by the narrator operating like an apex predator 95% of the time. Which, like I said, has its satisfactions – there's a lot of comeuppance and "righteous" killings. But for all that, this book is way more interested in its surprise! Twists! And not really interested in the class warfare story it's pretending to be about. If you want generation ship class warfare, you obviously want Rivers Solomon, not this.
But if you want a woman killing her way through a lot of evil people punctuated by a lot of scifi plot nonsense, here you go, you can do a lot worse.
3/5. On a generation ship, a "worm" – a member of the working class whose senses and bodies can be controlled by the executive elites – discovers technological secrets and becomes the leader of an insurgency. Also a lot of assassinations.
This has its emotional satisfactions, but there's a lot more zeal here than skill. The author seems to have one structural trick to build tension – beginning with our narrator in an airlock about to be spaced, then flashing back to explain how she got there – and she deploys it over . . . and over . . . and over. Which is funny since this book actually has very little tension. It's punctured by the narrator operating like an apex predator 95% of the time. Which, like I said, has its satisfactions – there's a lot of comeuppance and "righteous" killings. But for all that, this book is way more interested in its surprise! Twists! And not really interested in the class warfare story it's pretending to be about. If you want generation ship class warfare, you obviously want Rivers Solomon, not this.
But if you want a woman killing her way through a lot of evil people punctuated by a lot of scifi plot nonsense, here you go, you can do a lot worse.
