The problem? Nothing actually happens for the vast majority of the book, until a packed finale that simultaneously feels overly delayed and too rushed, a clear case of Greene getting an idea for the beginning and ending of a decent short story, then unwisely thinking he could just throw 40,000 words of filler in between and call it a novel.Īlso, I must admit that I'm not much of a fan of social-realist sci-fi like is the case here (ugh, I get it, the space refugees are space poor and live in their space slums while dressed in their space rags), and am especially annoyed when it feels like an author is going through a checklist of #MeToo tropes, not because he's sincerely into them but because his publisher gave him a memo of details to be awkwardly inserted into the manuscript wherever convenient ("#7: Make sure a main character is in a loving gay relationship! #8: Have a minor character identify with third-gender pronouns!"), so to not be screamed at by Woke fangirls at his Conoconocon panel discussion six months later.
Onboard the Hajj, Hisako soon learns her dilemmas are overshadowed by the discovery of ancient secrets, a derelict warship, and a chance at giving the survivors of Earth a fresh start.This wasn't bad enough to officially be thought of as a "bad book " but the whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking of that line Homer says to Ricky Gervais during that one episode of The Simpsons - "You take forever to say nothing!" It's particularly bad in this case, because this is supposed to be a science-fiction novel, regarding an arranged marriage that will be perceived to take place in 25 years from the standpoint of the newborn infant wife growing up on a stationary planet, but only one year from the perspective of the deep-space trader groom who zooms around the galaxy at time-bending almost-light-speed. The arcane branch of physics it requires her to study broke off a thousand years before, and she is not keen on the idea of giving up everything she knows to marry a stranger and move onto an aging spaceship. In exchange for an education, better housing for her family, and a boost out of poverty, she's been contracted into an arranged marriage to Adem Sadiq, a maintenance engineer and amateur musician who works and lives aboard his family's sub-light freighter, the Hajj. Hisako Saski was born with her life already mapped out.
A long-lost battleship and an arranged marriage may hold the key to faster-than-light travel and humanity's future in R.W.W.
0 kommentar(er)
