Basilio

One of the things I love about speculative fiction is that it starts from an idea of something that could be, and explores where that could go. As a reader you accompany the writer through their though process and discover the possible consequences of that initial idea. Radicalized starts from a set of key messages that are part of the canon of the current mainstream ideological and political stance in one part of the globe and feels like it has to build a world and a plot that can serve the message, rather than the other way around.

Very shortly summarised :
- Big corporations are bad and xenophobic
- The Police and a lot of people in an entire country are racists
- Big Pharma and the government want to let people die
- The 1-percenters are too selfish to help others and too stubborn to be helped by the nice immigrants

As a foreign observer of the current American culture and socio-political situation I can (with all the limitation of any external viewpoint) see where this is coming from and I sympathise with the objectives. But as an enjoyer of speculative fiction it feels like the pandering to a specific crowd at a specific moment in time is a tad too heavy-handed. I wonder if this books will make any sense to anyone in 10, 20 or 30 years time, as some other books from 50 or 100 years ago still manage to do.

The Setting:
A nascent industrial colonisation of the moon where the economic interest of the super-powerful and tourists go hand in hand with a poor-ish lifestyle of accidents, some petty criminality and an overall small-town feeling combined with cosmopolitan tourism. The world building is well executed, and gives a believable image of the different economic actors and people's dynamics of the functioning of a small-size lunar complex. Interludes in the form of email exchanges with a character on earth provide the most interesting bits of background information on what goes on on earth.

The Characters:
The main character suffers from a healthy dose of Mary Sueism, she is so smart, she is so clever. This is somewhat balanced by bad choices made in her youth, and the idea that “just because I'm smart, it don't mean I need to follow a boring career”. It seems an attempt to create a balanced character, that doesn't always work. The supporting characters are stereotypes on steroids and seem to have been defined ad hoc: “techy nerdy engineer with a penchant for sex”, “brooding and disappointed father with infinite honesty”, “power-hungry billionaire with a soft spot for his daughter”, and so on. Each seems to push their main character feature to the extreme and is not really a believable and fleshed-out character even at the end of the book.

The Story:
The main plot is ok. It revolves around the challenges of making your own way in a place that offers plenty of opportunities, even though many of them would actually involve effort and unexcitement. An underlying “big change” in the socio-political structure of the colony leads the action, with some run of the mill undercover action, some sabotage and some saving the colony even though they may not recognise your efforts. Many of the episodes seem a bit constructed to bring along the plot or to be conveniently explained at a later moment in the book. All in all, however, an easy and pretty linear plot.

The Author and the Martian:
It looks like Weir tried to put in a number of things that made The Martian great: “101 ways in which space will kill you”, plus some chemistry/physics/engineering to satisfy the interested mind, and an inner dialogue of someone with an attitude. However, to me the comparisons stops there. While in his first book you had one character that you got to know little by little, and you accompanied through the intellectual challenges of survival in a really bad place, here the development is rather narrow, and you have a non-credible character that can learn electronics design on the morning, hack robots at noon and destroy smelting installations in the afternoon. In The Martian you were given reasons to believe the main character was smart enough to work out inventive solutions to his challenges, here you dont really know why you should.

The Audiobook:
Rosario Dawson makes a wonderful job of reading it and getting across the badassness of the main character.

Overall:
It's a good book. It lacks the spark that made the Martian great both as a book to read and as a world to think about, but it is still enjoyable. It's difficult to read it without thinking of the Luna series by Ian McDonald, which presents basically the same world, but with far more breadth and depth, showing the lunar world from different social classes and perspectives and at a more complex stage of development. Still well worth the read.

Christopher Paolini is not a superb writer: he sucks at world building, at character development, at avoiding trope over trope from the genres he touches or sometimes rips.. ehm.. gets inspired from (coughexpansecough).

But he's great at storytelling.

This book is a mix of extremely trite “sci-fi on a ship” aspects (the characters are carbon copies of all the usual stereotypes, and interact much the same way), and thinly veiled fantasy epic settings (replace orcs with aliens and the wilderness with space), but the story keeps you hooked from the moment it gets going. The way things happen and don't happen, develop and regress make for a very enjoyable reading, and decidedly a notch above the level of “bad writers”.

Is this a great book by the standards of “good sci-fi” (whatever that might mean to each of us)? Maybe not. Is it on par with the Eragon serie? Very much so: if you enjoyed that, you'll like this book very much. (And if in general you don't read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, then you won't recognise where many of the ideas are coming from, and you'll enjoy this all the more.)

Andy Weir is good at writing one scenario and one character. This book is that scenario and that character. And it's very good.

Add in a couple more characters than in the Martian, and a plot device that makes the story progress in 2 parallel tracks that are both entertaining and engaging, and the book is a pleasure to read! If you havent read The Martian this book will be incredible for you. If you have you'll recognise a lot of elements but you'll enjoy it just as much!

Also, Rocky is awesome :D

It's an easy book to like, hitting many typical tropes of modern fantasy but doing it in a good way.
It feels like a (better) rewrite of Peter V Brett's “Demon Cycle” (the african setting is a nice addition) with a heavy sprinkling of Brandon Sanderson “The Way of Kings” (lesser rather than slaves), all done without making the main character into a Gary Stu.

Dragons have a marginal role in the book and the story would stand perfectly on its own if they did not appear at all (demons on their own would have sufficed), but they do help in world-building and are used as a specific plot device I won't spoil but that works well.

Evan Winter's comment in this site summarises the reading experience very well: it's a very fun book to read and it feels like the author had fun writing it. If that means that'll make him more eager to write the sequels, so much the better, these are books I'll be looking forward to!