Robert Dresner

I won this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway, and since I have always loved sci-fi I figured there would be a good chance I would enjoy this book. Well, I was wrong. The core plot, the development of the first sentient AI creature, was great, but it was buried in a very dull narrative of the first manned trip to Mars. This novel, published in 2009, shows no awareness of the many Mars missions that had already been ongoing by the time this book came out, including landers that have been roaming the surface of Mars and sending back data for years. There is a peculiar scene near the beginning of this grand adventure where somehow the astronauts are having a drunken party with significant quantities of beer, on the orbiting space station, something that I doubt very much would occur in real life as a part of any space mission, let alone such a high profile mission as the first manned Mars mission.

All the scenes involving NASA or the US government seem unprofessional and unrealistic, as well, as if the author didn't really have much of an idea how professional politicians, media correspondents, or NASA professionals speak and act while working. As a rough sketch or draft of a novel, this book works well enough, but it reads as a draft, with too little emphasis on AI, the actual point of the novel's plot by the end of the book, and too much emphasis on sex, romance and political maneuverings by the US President's wife and the wife of the Mars Mission's captain. As written, the scenes involving the wives seem like they belong in a separate novel, and the monemtum the space scenes try to build fizzles each time the book shifts back to the wives. Since this book shifts gears so much, very little solid character development occurs, too, leaving all the characters flat enough that it is hard to care about any of them. And, since the AI creature develops out of a 'science' project that sounds more like a team-building art project, with no supporting development in the novel of AI concepts, it is hard to care about the AI creature either.

If this was a new book with the rest of the series still to be written I might be hopeful that more readers gave similar feedback in time so that the author could polish up volume 2 and end up with a decent set of novels following this one, but since it has been a few years and the trilogy is all published already, I am not sure I want to know how bad the rest of the series is. Maybe the sequels are better, though, now that we know that the point of book 1 was AI, not really Mars as such.… (mehr)