Wild Massive

Another book for the book club - another book I did not enjoy very much. I wanted to enjoy it, but I think the book is just not for me. There is way, way, WAY too much going on. If a book is going to take 500 pages, I'd like it to earn that - and unfortunately, I don't think this did. The author clearly has a lot to say and a lot churning in their mind, but putting it all in one book has robbed any of the stories from shining. One must ask - where, oh where, is an editor when they're needed most? This should have been 250 to 300 pages max and should have focused on just one part.When I read the Acknowledgements and saw that this is sort of meshed together from three or four different things, I basically slapped my head and said, “of course, it is,” out loud to the coffee shop. It's painfully apparent.Some of my gripes up front... I found the naming of characters to be really... weird. “Pivotal Moment,” “Epiphany Foreshadow,” “Allegory Paradox.” I don't think this is even explained away as translation, as so many things in this book half-are. Towards the end of the book, when certain artifacts are named after literary tropes, I started to REALLY roll my eyes. I think these are all intended to be sort of tongue-in-cheek funny, but they just annoyed me. Another gripe... Do you ever read a book and see something and think, “Oh, this author has clearly just binged a bunch of so-and-so or this-and-that.” Well, me too, and it happened big time in this book. I have no way of knowing for sure if the character of Nicholas Solitude was created after watching just a little too much Doctor Who, but WOW does it seem like it.I think I also really bumped against the author's writing style. I found the switches between first person and third person very strange. The dialogue OFTEN does not ring true - people just do not speak in the way they do in this book. Example: “For what it's worth,” CHARACTER said, “I greatly prefer that you're not dead.” “The circumstances are appealing to me as well.” The WHAT? People do not talk like this. The character repeating this isn't even a robot or something where you could sort of pretend that it's just a weird characterization. This happens over and over again. The dialogue just doesn't ring true for me and it really stopped me from getting into the story.Speaking of getting into the story. I got so irritated on page 290 that I picked up a pencil and wrote a note below my little sticker mark (how I typically mark bits in books). At page 290, the author takes several paragraphs to go into the background history of something that is almost completely irrelevant to the story and is never revisited again. This just KEPT happening all throughout the book. EDITOR - where are you? WHY are huge swaths of this book devoted to telling me about things that have no impact on the story? If it's worldbuilding - SHOW, don't TELL. The book loves to tell me things, but skips over so much of the showing. At 300 pages, this book should have been starting to wrap up.The author also seems to love firing off tweets in the text. I noticed this with [b:The Terraformers 60784471 The Terraformers Annalee Newitz https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1649899400l/60784471.SY75.jpg 64155389] by [a:Annalee Newitz 191888 Annalee Newitz https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1608627466p2/191888.jpg] as well. If you're writing speculative fiction - I kindly ask that you remember you're writing a BOOK. You don't need to contain your social commentary to 180 or 250 characters mid-stride. SHOW ME the consequences of what you're upset about, SHOW ME why things are not working right, SHOW ME how they can be better. Here are some examples of the author firing off a tweet:“At the age of fourteen, I knew the Building existed, but no-body I knew really liked to talk about it. They didn't teach us about it at school. I lived in one of those Americas where they printed textbooks with blank pages so that school boards could just decide on the fly what repressive bullshit they felt like teaching.”Any idea how much weight that string of sentences has on the story? None - absolutely none. This happens frequently, where the author will say how bad a thing is, but do nothing to show WHY or HOW it is bad, or WHAT can be done better. This isn't social commentary, it's tweeting. The author also calls Earth-floors hell worlds at one point which I think is also supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, all it does is sort of illustrate the total lack of clarity around how this world works. Everything is in a big building, that you can go outside of where there are folks and spaceships... But there are infinite floors that are world-sized (question mark??), and infinite, but not infinite... Certain modes of transportation open interdimensional rifts... but they still need to be aimed manually? I don't get it.I really hate to rag on this book so intensely. There were parts that I liked, but I had to work to like them. How I wish this book were 300 pages and that the author worked with an editor.In the spoiler below, I call attention to an opportunity to END the book radically on page 441.Finally... My hopes at a really funny ending were CRUSHED on page 441, where I saw such an amazing opportunity to end the story and shave 40 pages of pretty incomprehensible gobbledygook into what would have actually been a pretty funny meta joke. I'm going to write out what I wrote out at the back of the book as an alternate ending, picking up about midway down on page 441:"Then just put a stop to all this shit once and for all," said Carissa. Write The End in your little book and let's be done with it.""Oh, come on.""No, you come on Tabitha," Carissa snapped. "Rindasy and I are only in this mess because of you.""It doesn't work like that, even if I wanted it to!" Tabitha yanked out a clean sheet from her notebook, "here. You think everything's so easy?" Tabitha seized her pen and wrote, "The End###Just end it right after the "d" in "End" - no period, no closing quotation mark. That would have cracked me UP! I'd probably have been a little annoyed too. But you know what? If that'd been the end on page 295 or 320, and not before the closing action on page 441, I'd have been pleased as punch.