All right, first book review of the year! In all fairness, I finished this a while ago, I just haven’t taken the time to photograph it. This book is one I read on the recommendation of a former friend, and I have to say I’m not overly thrilled by it. I was excited to read it because Neil Gaiman’s got a positive review on the front cover. I have to say the ending was my favorite part. Not because it meant the book was over, but it was some of the best writing I’ve ever read. Spoilers ahead, but this book’s been out since 2002.
To be honest, I don’t know if I fully understood this book until the end. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to go, but it was very aware of itself for most of it, and I found that off-putting. It followed the trend I see in a lot of science fiction where sex is a major aspect of the book, and that is also something I find puts me off a book. I’m in no way a woman who disapproves of sex in books. I’ve written a few spicy scenes myself. But in my opinion, sex in sci-fi usually distracts from the story more than it helps. Space and science are already such vast subjects to try and condense into a workable fiction that adding in copious amounts of often violent, unnecessary scenes of lust tend to take away from the richness of the world presented.
One could argue that this kind of environment is suited for the desolate character of Ed Chianese, He’s a drifter, addicted to alternate reality tanks where he can avoid his own life. He doesn’t even have a life. He goes from place to place, witnessing murders and participating in some. He eventually joins a circus type crew and becomes a sort of fortune teller, or someone who sees the future. While his time is spent finding places to exist and having sex with people he shouldn’t, his story for me was far more compelling than that of the “main character,” Michael Kearney. Kearney is a serial killer who found a way to travel through time/space in order to do his killing. While this sounds like it should be interesting, I found myself incredibly bored with his sections of the story. He jumped from place to place, meeting up with his scientist friend, Sprake, or reuniting with his estranged wife for some uncomfortable sex in an even more uncomfortable setting. He’s forever chased by a creature called the Shrander that always seems to find him no matter where he runs. The story wraps around Kearney and Chianese, but there is one more character, Seria Mau, who comes into play. She is someone who ran away and got transformed into a ship. That is, her conscious mind did. She is forever linked to her spaceship, and throughout the course of the story, she starts to remember more and more about her life before she became who she is by the end of the story. Through each of these three main characters, the story opens up and constricts around you in such a way you don’t know it’s happening until you get devoured by it.
The way it all connects at the end is probably some of the best writing I’ve ever read, and that honestly saved this book for me. There is something intense when you realize what’s happening, and it propels you onward even though you don’t really want to stop reading because you want to stay in the decadence of the world Harrison created. There’s still no clear answer as to what the universe is about, but the way it’s all tied together makes it easy to forget you don’t get an answer.
I think if someone asked me to recommend a book, I probably would choose other sci-fi before I went with this one. It’s not bad, but it’s not my cup of coffee.
I give this book a 6.5/10.
********I read the 2007 Bantam Mass Market Paperback edition********
salisbury.fake 