Lis Mattson

Oh man where to begin.

I (re-)read this while sick over the span of 4 days and it was a tough, tough read. I had initially read it about 10 years ago as a high school assignment and didn’t get much out of it, not surprisingly.

Now, I find it terribly haunting and aggravating. I honestly don’t think I have anything intelligent to say right now. I have so many wispy, uncollected, deeply rooted thoughts about this book and pride and sin and character and sacrifice and selfishness.

Structurally, I love how Faulkner bends time and perspective and omniscience, it’s just remarkable. I’m obsessed with the concept of giving the reader just enough to understand everything without ever being explicit. How far can you blur the lines and still make the sketch visible? Is it a surprise? It’s pretty damn far.

I had really high hopes for this book, since it was recommended to me by two people who I hold in generally high regard. But man, I found it disappointing.

The prose is a drag. The characters are flat. I keep forgetting who’s who on the ship but it doesn’t seem to matter anyway. This book does not need to be nearly 600 pages.

The politics feel jarringly dated even for the time, compared to other great works of sci-fi published in the late 60s and early 70s. In general, I don’t have a problem enjoying works by authors who have politics I disagree with, but when terrible politics are the main focus of the novel, and not particularly compelling, it’s impossible to ignore.

There are some genuinely great elements to the story, but I wish I didn’t have to wallow through the rest to get to them.

I kept giving this book the benefit of the doubt, but at the end, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s really just a shallow work of fiction.

The first half reads like a rejected episode of TOS. The second half is worse. 3/10. I wouldn’t bother.

This one is so tough for me to review for 2 reasons:

1. I read it over the span of 10 months. I read the first third or so, thoroughly enjoyed it, but then took a break, procrastinated, and never got back to it until I was 5 days away from not getting to my January goal of finally finishing it. So my memory from the first bit is not so crisp.

2. This book’s ending.

I can’t stress enough that, for most of my reading experience, I was deeply in love. There is so much interest and intrigue, so much to say, so many strange, awe-inspiring, unknowable forces. I was practically drooling over it every time I picked it up. I was already writing the most glowing review of all time in my head.

Then I hit the last 40 pages or so and I don’t know what to say. It’s baffling.

So many plot lines are contorted to make sense at the end. Everything has to be explained. But Why? The only major part that isn’t fully explained is future society deus ex machina, which I think is dumb but arguably works, given the context. The mention of the paradox board made my eyes roll back into my skull. I think that making everything make sense is an impressive feat. But I don’t know why he felt compelled to do it.

And let’s not forget the shrike. The shrike is one of my favorite literary concepts of all time. And Simmons just completely neuters it at the end. This was the most disappointing. By the end, I wasn’t rooting for the pilgrims to win anymore. I realized that I was invested primarily in Gladstone and when her arc ended, I was satisfied.

It also gets very preachy at the end, which at this point I had gotten used to, but it felt more and more like Simmons himself was speaking directly to me instead of letting the characters bump around and get to those ideas on their own.

Well anyway, I want to believe in magic and the unknown. I want to believe that maybe the shrike isn’t pure evil. I want there to be that bit of ambiguity and mysteriousness and fantasy.

Simmons is great at birthing ideas and vignettes and moments, but not at gluing the pieces together. Work to your strengths. Overall, a huge bummer because I can’t state enough how much I adored the middle 300 pages. Still 9/10. Go read it.

Karen Russell has quickly became one of my favorites ever. She has such a gift for creating images brighter than I knew could exist in text. Her writing is effortlessly vivid and the world she creates is thought provoking and deeply, human-ly flawed.

She is so so good at weaving you into a blinding blissful fantasy and sharply spitting you out into cold hard reality. She got me again with this one.

Some of the writing and introspective bits from Trish are a little too on the nose for me. This would have been absolutely perfect if there was less inner monologue. It also feels a little preachy at times. She’s not wrong, but something feels off about it.

I also didn’t find it particularly scary, although I do have a very high tolerance for horror.

Great stuff from Watts as always. This one is tough to rate because The Island, a short story set farther in the future in the same storyline, with Sunday also as the narrator, is much much better. It’s incredible. It won the Hugo. Because I read The Island first, FFR felt like a prequel to me, and I’m not the biggest fan of prequels.

That being said, FFR has great characters (although admittedly I lost track of who was who a bit by the end). Lian is fantastic. Sunday is a little boring but has great development. Again, she is even better in The Island. Shout out to having multiple characters with neopronouns. And shout out to batshit superintelligent women.

I changed my rating halfway through writing this because I remembered how good the worldbuilding is. It’s such a good concept and it’s executed in a style that mushed my brain around in the best way. The eighth note gimmick was fun, although not groundbreaking. I am eagerly looking forward to reading the rest of the series.