hi :) It's Penny and as usual I'm here to talk about some bookish things
specifically today I wanted to talk about the last 1000 pages of science
fiction that I've read. So I've started a series recently where every time I read
a thousand pages of a particular genre, I then stop in to give you guys a little
bit more detailed reviews than I can manage to fit into my wrap ups because
these days I'm reading like 20 books a month and if I was to give my detailed
thoughts about all of those books in a wrap-up like how long would that even be?
But today I do have five science fiction books that I want to talk to you about
and I'm gonna talk about them from the one that I have the least to say about
to the one that I have the most to say about. So the first book is the only one
that I actually own physically and that is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams. This is really well-known science
fiction although it's also a bit of a comedy and even though I knew that going
in, it's almost the bit that disappointed me the most? When I was a teen I watched
the BBC television series that was based on this book and at that time I loved it.
I thought it was hilarious and a really interesting story.
Unfortunately reading this I still think the story is interesting but a lot of
the humor just wasn't quite doing it for me and I don't know if it's just because
it's an older style of humor... when was this book even published? 1979
slightly older than me! So maybe it's just that the style of humor isn't
really as funny as it used to be? It's also very British humor so I can see
that a lot of people wouldn't like it but often I quite like British humor so
I was surprised that I didn't. I think it's just that sometimes I felt like it
was trying too hard to be funny instead of just being casually funny. You know
like 'Oh oops I was funny'. And I think I was quite surprised how little of the
story this one book gets through because there is a whole series and I believe
the television series is based on the whole series because the beginning of
this doesn't really tell you very much at all. So part of me wants to continue
the series to see whether I get into it more but I'm not sure because this was a
bit of a slog to get through even though it's only 200 pages. Maybe I'll go back
and watch the TV series and that will motivate me to continue with the series. So
I think that most people will know what the story is about but if you don't
basically the earth is about to be destroyed in order to build an
intergalactic highway but luckily there is an alien on earth and he manages to
escape with one of the humans and they go out and kind of explore the galaxy by
hitchhiking around. The next book I want to talk about is Want by Cindy Pon so
this is the first book in a duology that was released a couple of years ago and
it is set in this dystopian future in Taipei where the pollution has gotten
really bad and there are also two classes of people. There are the richer
people who have these suits that protect them from the pollution and are kind of
quite spoiled brats - essentially the one-percenters of today
and then there are the poorer people who live in poverty. They are always getting
sick because of all the pollution and also a lack of access to medical
facilities and medical care and the main character we follow is one of these.
He has a group of friends that he's working with. They're trying to lobby the
government to make changes to improve the environmental situation and they
come up with a scheme that involves kidnapping to try and set things right.
I thought the issues this book investigated we're really interesting so
we've got the environmental issues and the effect that is having on the world
as well as this inequality between the haves and the wants. Of course both these
issues are very relevant in our current present and I think it did a good job of
showing what the world might be like if we don't make some changes. That's said I
really found it hard to connect with the characters especially the main character
is this boy and he very quickly gets into this girl and you know how I feel
about romance - I don't like it. And he was just thinking like
stereotypical boy stuff and like I don't care - how about we pay attention to the
actual important issues that are going on at the moment??? And also related to
that romance there was a reveal near the end that I just thought could have been
done in a much better way. I don't know what better way but the way it was done
didn't feel like it had the impact it was trying to have. Also the main
character has this group of friends and there were really not that many of them -
I think just like four of them - and the love interest also has a group
of friends and there were just so many side characters and they only have very
small parts in the story so I kept forgetting who was who. And there's a
part where something happens to some of those and you're meant to feel very
emotional about it and I was still just like yeah but who are these people again?
So overall I gave this three stars because I thought it was an okay read. I
really liked some of the concepts and the ideas that were being explored but I
just couldn't connect with the characters and I didn't care much about
the outcome. So next I'm going to talk about two audiobooks I've listened to
from the same series and both of which I gave four stars although I did find that
I enjoyed the second one better and that is the first two books of the Themis files. So
Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods, both by Sylvain Neuvel. So the series is told
through a bunch of different interview transcripts and files - hence the name of
the series the themis files. And we start by following this young girl who is
riding her bike through the forest and she falls into a hole and discovers that
she's fallen onto a giant hand and then when she's older she's involved with the
scientific group that are studying this hand and trying to work out where it
came from because it doesn't seem from the metal that it's made of that it
could have come from Earth. Now especially in Sleeping Giants I did find
the format a little bit difficult to get into because we're always being told
things through interviews, we're never in the present action. Well sometimes they
manage to do it so like someone's being interviewed as they're doing something
or they're recording someone as they're doing something but there is one
particular scene where things are very emotional and we only hear about it
after the fact and for me that made that whole scene kind of lose its emotional
impact. And also the audiobook is a full cast so all the different characters
voiced by different actors but I still found that sometimes I found two of the
main female characters quite confusing as in who is talking. If I wasn't paying
attention I'd be like is this Kara? Or Rose? I don't remember but I think in
the second book because I was a little bit more used to it I was able to
identify their voices better. So I got over that and I think just in general I
got used to the format and maybe in the second book he did a little bit better
in terms of finding ways to be in the present action rather than only hearing
about it after the fact. So the second book kind of builds in intensity and
we're getting much more involved on a bigger scale it's hard to talk about
without spoilers but the series gets quite extreme. I'm very excited about
reading the third book in the series. That said I do have a few other
criticisms. Firstly there is in the second book a torture scene where
listening to the audiobook you have to actually listen to someone being
tortured and like screaming and begging people to stop. I think that was
completely unnecessary. I had to stop it halfway through because I just honestly
didn't want to listen to it. So if you want to skip that scene when you get to
it, like feel free to. It adds nothing to the story and it was just
uncool and unnecessary. Also one of the female characters who does some quite
questionable things and is quite an unlikable character has a stutter and it
was kind of cool like that a stutter was included in the audiobook except for
the fact that she was the unlikable character and if you're gonna do like
cool unusual representation of someone with like a speech impediment I don't
think you should make them the unlikable character. It's almost like you're saying
oh this woman is bad because she can't speak properly. I don't like that. Also
there were a few bits where it got into quite long and in-depth explanations of
the genetics of certain things and honestly I don't care that much about
genetics. I understand that the author was trying to explain the logic of
certain things to you but honestly I was willing to take the genetics of the
situation based on what the character who is an expert in this field said. I
didn't need to understand it that much myself. So I feel like I said lots of
negative stuff but I honestly I really did love this series. It gets so epic.
There's some really great characters especially again in the second book. I
really loved Eugene, this general of a certain group that you're working
with, and there's also this young girl called Eva who I thought was really
lovely and even some of the other characters like Kara and Vincent are
growing on me. I will say there is a character, maybe even a couple, who died
in this book and I just I don't accept it. I don't want to believe that they're dead
so I don't, I don't believe they're dead. I do think if you like science fiction with
robots and genetics and conflict at a planetary scale then this would be a
good series for you. Then lastly we're going to talk about the Light Brigade by
Kameron Hurley. I picked this up because I really love
the Bel Dame Apocrypha series by Kameron Hurley. I love how gory and gritty and
dark it is. So the Light Brigade is another dystopian future, in this case
it's one where the world is run by these six main corporations and they are
really focused on profits. People are very undervalued. At the same time we
also have people living on Mars except that they get called Martians and the
corporations are at war with the Martians. Within this world we follow our
main character who one interesting aspect of the story was you don't learn
the gender for about three-quarters of the book. I will say I found this really
interesting. I got about three chapters in and I was like hang on what's the
gender of this person? Because I was trying to picture them in my head and I
couldn't quite do it and then I realized I hadn't even been told so I was really
interested to see how the story would use that but then when it was eventually
revealed, it was revealed and quite a lacklustre way and I don't necessarily
feel like it added anything to the story. In fact it almost hindered it because
when I was trying to picture this person in my head I couldn't picture them
because I didn't know is it a man or a woman or something else, I don't know.
And because it's all set in this army where it's really brutal and physical I felt
like to me gender would have made a difference. But I can kind of say that
it's interesting to make you think about is that true? Yeah I don't
know how I feel about that aspect of the story. But regardless we follow this main
character who's in one of the lower classes because they're not an official
like citizen because they don't belong to a corporation. You can't become a
citizen or a resident unless you belong to the corporation. Because of what's
happened in the war some of their family has died off and so they decide they
want to fight in the war to try and sort things out. So they join the army and
there's quite a lot of time spent in the build-up to this and then the training
of them being to the army and the reason why I pick this up is because I was told
that there is some aspect of time travel but it isn't until they actually get
through all their army training which is about halfway through the book that we
stumble across some time travel. So that was disappointing for me. Also once we
got into the time travel I was really disappointed with how it played out.
There's one part where some of the other characters who know this person can time
travel say you know 'why don't you do something to try and fix things in the
future? Because you know this horrible outcomes going to happen' and they say 'I
am trying to do something!' and reading it I was like 'are you??' because I haven't read
anything that tells me you're trying to fix things. You just seem to be like oops
I've time-traveled again! Oops I've time traveled again! I guess I just wanted the
main character take a bit more ownership of their journey and their time travel
experience. And then in the end when it's kind of revealed what's going on with
the time travel I thought that it would be something that would make it all
click and I would understand how it all fit together but instead it was like oh,
that's what happened. Okay, sure. There were a lot of hints throughout but I
just don't feel like they were clear enough. Maybe I'm just stupid but I felt
like so much more could have been done with this quite unique time-travel
concept. In the end I just don't feel like much happened. The other complaint
that I have about this is about all the the kind of complaints that corporations
have ruined the world by what they're doing and I totally understand this is
very similar to what's happening but I always try to remember that corporations
I just made up of people. And yes, sometimes the way the
system currently is it does encourage people to do things that aren't very
good but we made up the system. Humanity made up the system so we can change the
system. So at the end of the day its people, the people who create these
systems, that are responsible for the bad shit, not 'corporations' some kind of like
mythological concept. So I sometimes think when people focus on corporations
being evil that it's really just stopping people from thinking about the
fact that some people are doing evil things and we could fix it or at least
some of us could fix it. And maybe that's what I really missed is that I didn't
feel like there was a message of hope within this book. I always think whenever
I go into a dystopian I really like seeing how awful things could get but I
want that message of hope. The fact that we could dig ourselves out of it.
So I think Kameron Hurley did a really good job of making the army training
really realistic and the the war and the fighting was really realistic, the whole
world in general that she has created seemed really realistic but I think she
was just quite weak on plot, which is a criticism I've heard of her work before.
There certainly was a plot, it just didn't really seem to go anywhere and so in
the end I was quite unsatisfied. Which was disappointing because I was really
excited for this book, mainly because it told me it was going to have time travel
and it did but hmm. I think if you really think corporations are the villain in
this world and you want to get on a big like fuck the corporation's bandwagon
then you'll really like this book. I think if you're looking for really cool
tricksy time travel, maybe not. It is still an interesting time travel
concept so you might want to read it but just don't expect it to be too amazing.
Okay so I think I've been talking for way too long so those are the last
1000 pages of science fiction that I have read. If you have read any of these
books I would love to talk to you about them down in the comments, otherwise
thank you so much for watching. I hope that you're having a wonderful day and I
will see you next time :)