Dr Jane Holloway, a languages professor with an instinctive ability with languages – verging too close to magic for my SF tastes – joins a NASA crew, outstanding only in NASA’s extraordinary ability to choose the most inappropriate and conflicting collection of personalities for a ten month flight in such confined quarters. Their mission is to find an alien spaceship in the asteroid belt, long known about since an alien crash at Area 51, and either make contact with its inhabitants or explore should it prove empty. On arrival things rapidly fall apart largely due to the inability of the crew to trust each other. Is it really conceivable that NASA could pick such an ill-suited crew for such an important mission? Ultimately that question and other related ones kept sounding in my head throughout this fantasy of an SF story.
Setting aside my well documented dislike for excessive romance in my SF reading, the romance in this particular book was amongst the worst I have endured. I have seen many reviews quoting an interview with Wells in which she defends the inclusion of romance in science fiction, and even I will concede that it can have its place. However, what is indefensible is how atrociously the romance is handled in this particular case. It is so clumsy it feels like two separate authors at work. One is attempting a hard style SF plot and, whilst the science is pretty appalling, the writing style does work quite well with pragmatic hard engineering approaches to the various problems they encounter. The other is pure gushing, abandon all common sense, wish-fulfilment romance. The switches between the two feel like stepping between two moving surfaces and frantically trying to keep your balance. It is painfully bad, contributes little or nothing to the story and felt like it had been plugged in after some beta reader told Wells they thought the book should have some love interest.
Then there’s the science. This is set in the near future and whilst it is reasonably acceptable for the alien technology to conform to the Clarke’s famous definition of technology sufficiently advanced being indistinguishable from magic it is not acceptable to keep fumbling with the near future human technology. For example early on Wells has it that not only do people’s bodies smell more in micro gravity but also people are more sensitive to smell in microgravity. However a little research produces no evidence for the former (though admittedly living in such a confined space with recycled everything I imagine a certain amount of odour is inevitable) and the latter is simply wrong; in microgravity excess fluids tend to rise to people’s heads creating congestion and significant decrease in the sense of both smell and taste; spicy food is, apparently, king on the International Space Station. So whilst Wells seems to be attempting a hard SF story with a touch of romance, what she has achieved is a fanciful SF story with intermittent and very abrupt doses of heavy handed romance.
I’m a little surprised I finished this book, although surprisingly well proof edited, it otherwise suffers from the painfully amateur writing I am coming to expect from ninety percent of the self-published novels that I read. I really do wonder why I keep trying to read them, but occasionally there are stand out gems; I just wonder if they’re worth all the pain to find them.
1/5 stars
Setting aside my well documented dislike for excessive romance in my SF reading, the romance in this particular book was amongst the worst I have endured. I have seen many reviews quoting an interview with Wells in which she defends the inclusion of romance in science fiction, and even I will concede that it can have its place. However, what is indefensible is how atrociously the romance is handled in this particular case. It is so clumsy it feels like two separate authors at work. One is attempting a hard style SF plot and, whilst the science is pretty appalling, the writing style does work quite well with pragmatic hard engineering approaches to the various problems they encounter. The other is pure gushing, abandon all common sense, wish-fulfilment romance. The switches between the two feel like stepping between two moving surfaces and frantically trying to keep your balance. It is painfully bad, contributes little or nothing to the story and felt like it had been plugged in after some beta reader told Wells they thought the book should have some love interest.
Then there’s the science. This is set in the near future and whilst it is reasonably acceptable for the alien technology to conform to the Clarke’s famous definition of technology sufficiently advanced being indistinguishable from magic it is not acceptable to keep fumbling with the near future human technology. For example early on Wells has it that not only do people’s bodies smell more in micro gravity but also people are more sensitive to smell in microgravity. However a little research produces no evidence for the former (though admittedly living in such a confined space with recycled everything I imagine a certain amount of odour is inevitable) and the latter is simply wrong; in microgravity excess fluids tend to rise to people’s heads creating congestion and significant decrease in the sense of both smell and taste; spicy food is, apparently, king on the International Space Station. So whilst Wells seems to be attempting a hard SF story with a touch of romance, what she has achieved is a fanciful SF story with intermittent and very abrupt doses of heavy handed romance.
I’m a little surprised I finished this book, although surprisingly well proof edited, it otherwise suffers from the painfully amateur writing I am coming to expect from ninety percent of the self-published novels that I read. I really do wonder why I keep trying to read them, but occasionally there are stand out gems; I just wonder if they’re worth all the pain to find them.
1/5 stars
