Unexploded Remnants

2.5/5.

I'm giving some benefit of the doubt / grace here to the author, but also to myself because I do not typically read novellas and other short-form fiction. I recognize these as different forms than novel writing, and I don't have a well-developed critical eye for them.

That aside... We're reading this for my spec-fic book club this month. A friend of mine, in her review, called it “trite.” I was surprised by her review, because when I read it I was only about halfway through the novella and had been enjoying myself. I ended up using the same word in one of my notes. That note came on page 81, where some minor mumblings came to a head.

Like many speculative fiction works, the book is interested in a post-currency economy. But... not that interested. I recognize that in a short-form work, we're not going to get a long explanation of how the economy works. The thing is, the book tried to do a little of this and fell into a no-man's land of too-much but not-enough. The book starts in a busy marketplace. We get a sense that information and favors are effective forms of currency. Later, we learn that our protagonist is very rich — rich enough to live several lifetimes at ease, we're told, if not more. But what does this mean? By virtue of what? Many authors write away problems by making characters rich, but that seems really bizarre in this setting where the author is trying to put forward a favor-based economy. Has this character done so much that people owe them so many favors that they don't have to work? Of have they sold information to such an extent that they have monetary means of survival? How do money and favors interact? I don't know, and I'm not 100% sure the book does, either.

That's a pretty minor complaint, and one that basically every speculative fiction bumps into at some point. Star Trek is famously inconsistent and sometimes nonsensical on this, so we can leave it aside.

The characters are a bit strange. Our protagonist began their experience in their current reality as a misplaced Oxford PhD student in the 1960's. I am not totally sure that Bugs Bunny was the most popular thing among Oxford Students in the 1960s, but apparently he was popular enough for our lead to name her computational companion after him. This gave me a chuckle at first, but by the end (keep in mind, only 100 pages later), I was nonplussed at the Bugs Bunny dialogue. Similarly, I had written down, “Can you call a character Alice without conjuring up Alice in Wonderland?” Not 3 pages later, there is a reference to following the white rabbit — so the answer is no. I think calling a character Alice and having them leap across strange worlds is clear enough as a reference, I'm not sure we needed several textual references to the tale. It took the reference from maybe-subtle thematic shorthand to “HEY, YOU EVER SEE THAT DISNEY MOVIE?”

Remember when I said our lead was a 1960's Oxford PhD student? I'm wondering if Oxford had lower standards in the 60s, because for an old(*) and experienced being in the Universe, our lead is remarkably dumb when it comes to how she interacts with the unexploded remnant. This thing tells her exactly what it is over and over again, and yet, she is surprised that it does exactly what everyone, including the thing itself, says what it'll do! I don't get it! In a longer form, maybe we'd have an explanation as to why Alice doesn't listen to this thing and insists she knows better than it.

I think there was space to explore that, even in these 105 pages. There is a chapter where Alice visits a friend and meets their family. It is entirely without purpose and also... pretty weird. I'd have suggested cutting that whole chapter and character and giving us more space to understand and relate to Alice, something we're never given in the novella.

The ending is a little hard to follow. It's sort of unclear as to the sequencing of events and the consistency of things. It doesn't really matter because the ending can be seen coming from miles away and it's not terribly original.

It was a short read and that makes almost everything pretty forgivable. I enjoyed big parts of it, but I think with some editing this could have been something a lot more than it ended up as.