Simon Morden

I almost did not finish this one, but in the end it was worth soldiering through. The book is sold as The Martian meets And Then There Were None. That's not a bad pitch. The premise is that a bunch of people who are in harsh prisons for life and have some adequate skills are offered the chance to serve their sentence by accepting to be sent to Mars and build a base there. The group, along with a supervising officer, get to Mars successfully and set about their work, but then they start dying one by one. One of them must be murdering the others.

So far so good, my problem was the execution. It started well when the main character was in prison and got the offer, but when the training started everything stopped making sense. The training was absurd and inadequate, and no one remarked on it. It's like the company that organized it did not want the project to succeed.

Then, there's the writing. The style, always with short sentences got old soon. The characters, except from the point of view character, were not explored at all. We never get to know them, beyond the most superficial of descriptions, so how are we supposed to enjoy guessing who might be the killer?

It got better towards the end, when there was more action, but it's not a great book.

The book can stand alone more or less, but there's room for a sequel that has already been published. The curious thing is that I'd like to find out what happens in the sequel (titled "No Way"), but I do not really want to read it.… (mehr)

It’s about this tough, foul-mouthed whiz kid named Samuil Petrovich. In these kinds of literature, world-building comes first, characterization second, at least that’s what I think. Petrovich isn’t that likeable a character, but he fits in the world he moves in. He is a survivor. Not only does he struggle with the outside world, he also has some major health problems. In this future world, a Great Calamity of the nuclear variety has occurred decades before, and humanity and society has had to adapt to it. Given that, there did occur technological progress, but as the cyberpunk cliché goes, it’s ‘high-tech and low-life.’ The low-lives are the main characters of the book. Even the supposed harbinger of law and order, the police detective Chain is a bit shady. The whole plot is put into motion when Petrovich, out of some compulsion to do something good, rescues the daughter of a yakuza boss from a kidnapping. From there, things move fast. This is a short, fast-paced novel set in a dystopic city.… (mehr)

Főhősünk arra ébred, hogy fogalma sincs hol van és kicsoda, egy hang utasítja, hogy keljen fel. Az alapötlet nem túl eredeti, de ez önmagában még nem lenne baj. A nagyobb gond, hogy nem igazán tudtam azonosulni a főszereplővel, így sokkal kevésbé érdekelt, hogy miként is került ebbe a helyzetbe. Pár fejezet múlva erre választ kapunk, és onnantól már nem csak a főszereplőért hanem sokkal több mindenért kellene aggódnunk, de engem nem tudott magával ragadni a könyv. Egy ideig próbáltam befejezni, majd amikor láttam, hogy tulajdonképpen ez is egy több részes történet első kötete, inkább feladtam.

Nemrég olvastam Andy Weirtől a Project Hail Mary-t, ami lényegében ugyanígy indult így óhatatlanul is összehasonlítottam a két regényt, és a különbség bizony óriási. Ott rögtön elérte a szerző, hogy azonosuljak a főhőssel, hogy érdekeljen a sorsa.… (mehr)