Billy Conn
This book EKED a 4-star rating out. If Goodreads would let me give 3.5 stars, I would, and I wouldn't have felt too bad about 3 stars. It gets the 4th star because of how strong it opened. I tore through this book in about 4 hours.
The writing is generally pretty good, and rises to very good in a few places. It's well-paced, going from a slow-boil to an actiony climax without missing a gear. The science - while not matching how things work in the real world at all - is pretty consistent (one goof I noticed, but it wasn't major). The reveal and twist is handled perfectly.
So... why did it almost get three stars? That's pretty simple. The book used a neat (not original, but neat) premise, very good writing, excellent setup... to set up a 50's pulp serial idea. And the ending was... pretty lame.
tl;dr: Worth the read, but it's not going to be life-changing for anyone.
This is actually the weakest Laundry Files book so far, in my opinion. Mo as the main character was good in theory, but didn't work in this book. In fact, here's some really damning praise: the best parts of this book are the parts of the previous book from Mo's perspective.
The superheros as symptom of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN feels like it's opening a big can of worms for the universe. The management-fixes-everything fits the bureaucromancy-based world of the Laundry well, but the actual feel of the story fits Robert Aspirin much more than Stross.
Mild Spoilers Follow:
One big part of that is that, well, Mo doesn't seem to LIKE Bob in her head-space most of the time, to the point that it makes her... unlikable. There are a couple of scenes where the narrative shows otherwise, but generally, she's either disparaging towards him or disregarding his feelings altogether. I -think- this was trying to show her as an individual inching towards a nervous breakdown, and her feelings towards Bob are more a symptom that she's inching in that direction, but it just doesn't work here. Maybe if this wasn't the first book with Mo being the primary protagonist, it would have, but we have no baseline to go from.I think that's a big part of the problem. I got this, found out that Mo was the driving force, and thought, "Cool. I'll see some Agent Candid!". Before this book, I would have told you I thought Candid was possibly more interesting than Bob. Now? I take it back.The story itself is mediocre. I just expect better of Stross. Generally, a fantastic juxtaposition of the normal and the strange is what the Laundry Files presents. While I'm not normally of the clan of "It's different and therefore wrong", this presenting of the weird-as-the-new-normal didn't work. Maybe just because it just felt so abrupt? There was only the smallest backdrop of society changing (an odd omission from Stross). I think the idea was that everything happened relatively suddenly, but it still felt like there should have been much more violent cultural shifts.Instead, I spent 80% of the book reading about her org chart, often in such detail that even I - normally someone into this kind of thing - started getting bored.I will say that the other 20% - and the last 10% in particular - of the book made up for a lot. We see Candid in action, a bit of world-building, and the fleshing out of characters that are interesting tools for Stross to use later.
All in all? It's a below-average Laundry Files book, which still puts it as a good book, but don't expect it to be the best thing you read this year.
While the setting is vaguely interesting, the writing isn't. It's aggressively boring. I don't mean the plot - which is pretty generic filler plot - but the writing itself. I can say that I didn't put it down for the last half of the book - but only because I knew that if I did, I'd never pick it back up.
I tried to give this a fair shake. I actually stopped reading it and came back to it, which generally makes me much more generous to a book. I then kept going between it and another book and asking myself, “Is this really as bad as it seems?”
It's pretty terrible. I've read worse, but this still falls into the “laughably bad” category. If it had been written with even the slightest hint of self-awareness, I would have given it another star or even two, but I think he was trying to be serious!
The dialog is terrible. I have more realistic sounding conversations with my roommate's cat. The author is definitely a fan of “tell, don't show”. And what he has to tell us is the Saturday-morning cartoon version of character development. Not even the good Saturday morning ones - the failed ones that came on before most kids were up. I was half expecting his hero to suddenly develop eye lasers, just so that I would KNOW for a fact he was screwing with readers.
There's one section at the end, that develops into a totally unnecessary soft-science gloop of an explanation of several pieces of... the plot-like substance found here, given as highly detailed exposition between two characters... for one of whom it's totally out of place (except he's Ninja-Batman-Jesus). It was like reading a b-grade movie. I had to put down the book until I stopped laughing. So, points for that. I just don't think it was intentional.
The amount of wish fulfillment on display in the book is... well, it goes past funny into “mildly creepy”.
When I make the comparison to cartoons, I do not make it idly. If you watched cartoons as a kid, you may remember one-shot abilities that never show up again. Check! Boring female protagonists that exist primarily as a walking reason to be involved in this week's adventure, maybe also to be screen candy. Check!
It's just all-around... bad.
I'm always saddened when I can't give a book 3.5 stars, and it deserves it. It wasn't amazing, it wasn't life-changing, but it was solid. Add a few technical flaws that take you out of the story, or detract from the whole, and the mouse cursor moves a few pixels left.
And it's a shame. Taken as a whole, I think the trilogy is very good. It's a shame that the weakest book of the trilogy is at the end.
The comparisons to “[b:Flowers for Algernon 18373 Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1367141311s/18373.jpg 3337594]” are pretty apt. tl;dr: I think Flowers is a better book. Speed has more to try to say - maybe not at depth, but definitely more - but has some technical flaws that I found difficult to overlook. I waffled between 3 and 4 stars several times - at its best, it's quite good. It's just that when it fails, it brings the entire show down.The biggest problem I've heard elsewhere is that it promotes either "Autism must be cured", or "Treating autism is ablist propaganda!". I've seen both - it was one reason I've put off reading the book for so long. I think it's more complicated than either position, and I have to work myself up to reading position pieces.Fortunately, I... didn't take either away from the book, and frankly, that's the thing I liked best. The main character ends up with his autism treated, but that was after spending most of the book against the idea, struggling with what changes it would make, if it would change who he was. And, best of all, it does change him. Some of his friends chose differently. And, while he got to chase his biggest dream, he lost touch with his friends, and the woman he loved wasn't nearly as interesting afterwards. I think Moon was aiming for it to be more of a mixed bag than it sounded, but after consideration, I think that would have been somewhat difficult, at least with the time allocated. Seriously - what else could you take from him while still leaving it mixed?The biggest failing was pacing. The ending feels very rushed, and Lou's decision to have the operation, his recovery, and the post scene all total 20 pages. I think her decision to have those pieces take very little space are understandable - having a long recovery invites even more comparison to a certain other book, and a long normalcy period has other potential problems.Another problem is that Lou's capabilities seem to change depending on what the plot needed. Several times, I was jerked out of the narrative by a lack of understanding or a "deep" pondering that didn't seem in line with his earlier established capacity.Several minor subplots were introduced, built up, and then conveniently ignored. I think they were attempts to help flesh out the main character and his friends, but they fell flat - to the point that I re-read a significant portion of the book to see if I had missed what happened.The characters, other than Lou, were... fairly two dimensional. I think that works best here, as it gives Lou a chance to shine, and for us to see where his limits are.Overall? Don't read it if you're looking for hard sci-fi, epic fantasy, a lot of action, or even a fast-moving plot. Most of the book is about the interactions of Lou with others, and the remainder his introspection, which is nothing really new in the genre. That said, sometimes, what you want is to approach a well-trodden place from a new path, though, and that's exactly what this book does. Recommended.
Overall, a read, but has some technical flaws a review would be remiss not to mention:
Brunner was cyberpunk before cyberpunk was cyberpunk. The Shockwave Rider was written years before Neuromancer, and ARPAnet less than 50 nodes. As far as I know, the first recorded use of the word worm to describe a self-replicating - without human intervention - computer program. He brought up the concept of “Information wants to be free” years before Brand, if only his wording had been more clever. Much of the high concept sci-fi narrative is excellent. His dystopic vision is excellent. Basically, if you're reading sci-fi because you like good ideas, go, read it. It's short, which compensates for the flaws nicely.
So, why only three stars? It's a personal thing. There's something about Brunner's style - his one-dimensional characters, his deus ex machina, his flat writing style which just seems somehow... boring. The closest comparison I could make was Ayn Rand - but Brunner is several degrees better than that.
Still, once I had mentally made the comparison, it wouldn't go away. Every time a new character was introduced, I could tell almost immediately which side in the coming finale that person would be on. And the reports that broke up some of the ending chapters were some of the most interesting writing in the book!
5/5 for ideas, cleverness. It's still applicable today, though in different ways than when it was written. 2/5 for execution.
This isn't a very good novel.
The characters are flat - meaning they do most of what you'd expect. The antagonist is evil and stupid, the heroes - good, a bit tarnished, but what do you expect from King? The town is in Maine, but might as well be another world entirely.
So don't go into this expecting a good novel. You won't find it here.
It's not a novel at all. It's a novel-length fairy tale.
By that, I mean that the story is almost exactly what you'd expect from a fairy tale. Evil harms good, situation forces good to confront evil, evil defeats itself due it its own stupidity. So don't read it for the story. Read it for the storytelling. And in that, King still does a good job.
