If you've ever wondered what a single Doctor Who episode would be like if it lasted 32 hours, this book is your answer. It's very clear to me that Paolini was writing a script for a future movie/series adaptation. You might enjoy this book if you really like YA Fantasy. I don't. Paolini spent a ton of time researching how spaceships and FTL travel would hypothetically work, and forgot to make the story interesting. I predicted the ending about 400 pages in and I really didn't need to read the other 500.
I'm going to keep the review really vague but your threshold for spoilers may be higher than mine, so this is your warning.
I don't usually annotate while I'm reading, but this time I had to because I kept having to stop reading to stare into the void. This book starts off great. I was having a good time. And then Paolini decided it was a good idea to have the protagonist be disgusted by someone's burn scars and I just???? Are we really going to describe, in detail, how repulsive she finds them? Apparently, we are. And then she goes on to say that she doesn't understand why they kept the scars when they're so easy to remove. I don't know how to make authors understand that people with scars EXIST in the real world and calling them disgusting is fucking rude and nasty. People with burn scars are going to read this book and I don't see why they should be made to feel disgusting. These scars are later on, of course, part of the extremely cliché tragic backstory of the character. Who is a stereotype. You're also going to hear about how losing a limb would be absolutely devastating if it wasn't because they can be regrown. Which, you know, they can't be IRL, so if you're missing a limb I guess your life must suck. And of course, the bad guys have deformities, because the villain with a deformity trope hasn't been used enough and we need to perpetuate that. It had a very ableist vibe that bothered the hell out of me.
And then there's the couple of times when gender is assumed to be a binary by two different characters. This book is set in the 24th century. The attempt to seem woke later on falls flat.
This is a plot driven book. If you're expecting depth or a personality from any of the characters beyond "overenthusiastic teenager", "butch lesbian who fixes things and doesn't like you to touch them", "sarcastic smartass AI" or "broody and jaded Captain of a ship with a tragic past and a big heart", you're going to be disappointed. None of the relationships among the characters are developed in the text except for one, and it's just... nothing new or exciting.
The space opera genre is exploited for all it is worth. It's an endless battle with really nothing interesting happening. You get blow for blow descriptions of one battle after another, and you're going to know exactly what hurts, the weapon that was used and by whom, where that specific enemy ended up after the protagonist hit them, what happened to their body, how she stepped over it, and the way that the metal felt in her hand when she opened the door. I like descriptive books a lot. They're my favourite. But this was entirely too much of a good thing. This is in contrast with the periods in which they're travelling and the protagonist has to spend three months doing nothing in a spaceship, other than advancing her Jedi training. This happens several times.
The alien language was a cute concept in theory but it didn't work well in practice. And it's probably less irritating in written form but the format of the conversations was repetitive AF and it was horrible to listen to.
The philosophical discussions attempted in this book were as basic as it gets. There were also several times when the protagonist waited to do something she could have done earlier simply to advance the plot at the right time, and it felt really forced.
To sum up: we have The Chosen One with the Magic Relic, the Wise and Omnipotent Ancient Civilisation, and the misguided current inhabitants of the place. The ending was overly sentimental. And there is taking inspiration from other books because nothing is original, and then there's having one idea about a cool artefact and forgetting to develop literally everything else.
Out of context criticisms so they're not spoilery:
- It's cyanide that smells like almonds, not arsenic. Arsenic smells like garlic
- Why does a xenobiologist know nothing about jellyfish?
- Why would space jellyfish use artificial gravity???
- A career in xenobiology apparently doesn't include Religion and Philosophy 101
- Daleks but less evil
- Daleks but more evil
- The Force but it's a Thing
- Nice attempt at a conlang but there is literally no way for a person to speak it without technology
- Take your contacts off????
- A civilisation isn't going to call itself "The Old Ones"
- Literally Galadriel
I'm going to keep the review really vague but your threshold for spoilers may be higher than mine, so this is your warning.
I don't usually annotate while I'm reading, but this time I had to because I kept having to stop reading to stare into the void. This book starts off great. I was having a good time. And then Paolini decided it was a good idea to have the protagonist be disgusted by someone's burn scars and I just???? Are we really going to describe, in detail, how repulsive she finds them? Apparently, we are. And then she goes on to say that she doesn't understand why they kept the scars when they're so easy to remove. I don't know how to make authors understand that people with scars EXIST in the real world and calling them disgusting is fucking rude and nasty. People with burn scars are going to read this book and I don't see why they should be made to feel disgusting. These scars are later on, of course, part of the extremely cliché tragic backstory of the character. Who is a stereotype. You're also going to hear about how losing a limb would be absolutely devastating if it wasn't because they can be regrown. Which, you know, they can't be IRL, so if you're missing a limb I guess your life must suck. And of course, the bad guys have deformities, because the villain with a deformity trope hasn't been used enough and we need to perpetuate that. It had a very ableist vibe that bothered the hell out of me.
And then there's the couple of times when gender is assumed to be a binary by two different characters. This book is set in the 24th century. The attempt to seem woke later on falls flat.
This is a plot driven book. If you're expecting depth or a personality from any of the characters beyond "overenthusiastic teenager", "butch lesbian who fixes things and doesn't like you to touch them", "sarcastic smartass AI" or "broody and jaded Captain of a ship with a tragic past and a big heart", you're going to be disappointed. None of the relationships among the characters are developed in the text except for one, and it's just... nothing new or exciting.
The space opera genre is exploited for all it is worth. It's an endless battle with really nothing interesting happening. You get blow for blow descriptions of one battle after another, and you're going to know exactly what hurts, the weapon that was used and by whom, where that specific enemy ended up after the protagonist hit them, what happened to their body, how she stepped over it, and the way that the metal felt in her hand when she opened the door. I like descriptive books a lot. They're my favourite. But this was entirely too much of a good thing. This is in contrast with the periods in which they're travelling and the protagonist has to spend three months doing nothing in a spaceship, other than advancing her Jedi training. This happens several times.
The alien language was a cute concept in theory but it didn't work well in practice. And it's probably less irritating in written form but the format of the conversations was repetitive AF and it was horrible to listen to.
The philosophical discussions attempted in this book were as basic as it gets. There were also several times when the protagonist waited to do something she could have done earlier simply to advance the plot at the right time, and it felt really forced.
To sum up: we have The Chosen One with the Magic Relic, the Wise and Omnipotent Ancient Civilisation, and the misguided current inhabitants of the place. The ending was overly sentimental. And there is taking inspiration from other books because nothing is original, and then there's having one idea about a cool artefact and forgetting to develop literally everything else.
Out of context criticisms so they're not spoilery:
- It's cyanide that smells like almonds, not arsenic. Arsenic smells like garlic
- Why does a xenobiologist know nothing about jellyfish?
- Why would space jellyfish use artificial gravity???
- A career in xenobiology apparently doesn't include Religion and Philosophy 101
- Daleks but less evil
- Daleks but more evil
- The Force but it's a Thing
- Nice attempt at a conlang but there is literally no way for a person to speak it without technology
- Take your contacts off????
- A civilisation isn't going to call itself "The Old Ones"
- Literally Galadriel