In the future Man has colonized Mars and is mining the asteroids. Not all is roses though as there is conflict between Earth, Mars and the miners and fighting breaks out.The story focuses on two men, one a cop among the miners and the other an officer on a spaceship as they come into contact with aliens.Pretty immersive and entertaining, it slows somewhat near the end but overall a satisfying tale. Quietly competent in the most perfunctory way. The beginning and the end are great, but the middle sags badly. None of the characters is particularly interesting, and the dialogue runs the risk of causing eyeballs to roll out of skulls. The tick-tock regularity of the chapter lengths betrays an abjection to word counts and balance (aka padding), a good sign of a comfortably successful author (or two) with nothing to prove, running on autopilot. The page:plot ratio egregiously favours the former, and while some action scenes and overarching ideas show sparks of originality, the vast majority of ideas are stultifyingly familiar.The archetypal modern sf novel: overlong, perfunctory, and utterly insipid. Not actively bad, but not exactly shooting for the stars, either.
What do You think about Leviathan Wakes (2011)?
Great space opera, detective noir, real page turner
—rachael
- novelist read-a-like from Ancillary Justice
—Jia
