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3.14 AVERAGE
3.14 AVERAGE
Captain Hadrian Sawback is billed as a kind of James T Kirk crossed with 'American Dad'. I think he's much closer to Futurama's Zapp Brannigan. A little bit of Zapp Brannigan goes a very long way.
Here are three reasons you might want to read Steven Erikson’s book.
theantagonistdiaries.wordpress.com/2019/02/13/willful-child/
theantagonistdiaries.wordpress.com/2019/02/13/willful-child/
Willful Child held a lot of promise, however, it falls flat on many of accounts. Though this book starts out as a fun source of amusement, it lost my attention fairly quickly. I did end up finishing the book but that was mainly because of the loyalty I have to any Star Trek-inspired story (I am a Trekkie after all). Erikson introduces a lot of comical figures that are original in their nonsense but the author seemed to expect too much out of these figures. The entire book is held up mainly by the humor and not much else.
Like I said, I did enjoy the comedy at first but without an exciting plot, this book began to bore me. Even the characters soon begin to feel one-dimensional with no unique qualities that would separate one cartoon from another. They were created to be ridiculous but that’s all they were—there was no formation to them. It was simply one joke after another that the author threw into the story; no intriguing plot points or developing characters to keep me hooked.
I would give it a shot if you’ve had good luck with other parodies but these clearly aren’t my thing.
Like I said, I did enjoy the comedy at first but without an exciting plot, this book began to bore me. Even the characters soon begin to feel one-dimensional with no unique qualities that would separate one cartoon from another. They were created to be ridiculous but that’s all they were—there was no formation to them. It was simply one joke after another that the author threw into the story; no intriguing plot points or developing characters to keep me hooked.
I would give it a shot if you’ve had good luck with other parodies but these clearly aren’t my thing.
adventurous
funny
reflective
fast-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
really 3.5 stars, Kirk without Spock is like drinking too much tequila, fun until it isnt....
I'll note up front that I couldn't get past the 30% mark.
Willful Child is a parody of scifi tropes. Which, in this case, means a lot of characters doing stupid, harmful or malicious things for no reason other than to drive the plot and jump from one gag to the next. But because none of the characters have any internal motivation, it really only parodies the crappiest of crappy scifi junk and all of the jokes land with a thud. Oh, the captain says something dumb, so dumb that he shouldn't ever be a janitor let alone a captain. Funny? Not really. Maybe it would work as a 1970s Mad Magazine article - ten pages is about all I could take.
Lots of other people enjoyed it but it had me irritated and bored. Read Scalzi's "Red Shirts" instead - it has some real characters with lots of jokes and some heart to it.
Willful Child is a parody of scifi tropes. Which, in this case, means a lot of characters doing stupid, harmful or malicious things for no reason other than to drive the plot and jump from one gag to the next. But because none of the characters have any internal motivation, it really only parodies the crappiest of crappy scifi junk and all of the jokes land with a thud. Oh, the captain says something dumb, so dumb that he shouldn't ever be a janitor let alone a captain. Funny? Not really. Maybe it would work as a 1970s Mad Magazine article - ten pages is about all I could take.
Lots of other people enjoyed it but it had me irritated and bored. Read Scalzi's "Red Shirts" instead - it has some real characters with lots of jokes and some heart to it.
After the excellence that was the Malazan Book of the Fallen, I had very, very high expectations of this. Maybe that was a bad idea. Willful Child is certainly funny in a number of places, but don't expect Malazan-style characterization or storytelling here.
The main thing that got me was the pacing. Wow. There's no room to breathe in this book, at all, ever. Instead, you have a constant flow of conflicts and actions and events and seemingly random decisions by the characters and the author, none of them subdued. This is a roller coaster where the entire track is as high as humanly possible and never goes back down - which is not how roller coasters are supposed to work. It's entertaining and reads like a breeze, but there was no opportunity to enjoy things or get to know the characters; it was just joke after joke after joke.
The protagonist is kind of a sleazy womanizer, and in most other settings I would have found him pretty shocking and distasteful. In Willful Child, though, his behavior is downright tame compared to all the insanity around him, so it didn't bother me that much; others may not have the same experience.
Most of the humour is actually pretty hilarious, I found, and it didn't seem to rely too much on Star Trek trivia to be funny, despite being mostly discussed as a Star Trek parody. If all you want is a bunch of laughs and you don't want to think too hard about it, this is a good book to read.
But there's zero room to get to know the characters on a more personal level, even the protagonist, and to me this means that we miss out on the opportunity for some truly impactful humour that has deep roots in the story. Instead, we just get a series of (as I said, mostly really funny) gags.
The main thing that got me was the pacing. Wow. There's no room to breathe in this book, at all, ever. Instead, you have a constant flow of conflicts and actions and events and seemingly random decisions by the characters and the author, none of them subdued. This is a roller coaster where the entire track is as high as humanly possible and never goes back down - which is not how roller coasters are supposed to work. It's entertaining and reads like a breeze, but there was no opportunity to enjoy things or get to know the characters; it was just joke after joke after joke.
The protagonist is kind of a sleazy womanizer, and in most other settings I would have found him pretty shocking and distasteful. In Willful Child, though, his behavior is downright tame compared to all the insanity around him, so it didn't bother me that much; others may not have the same experience.
Most of the humour is actually pretty hilarious, I found, and it didn't seem to rely too much on Star Trek trivia to be funny, despite being mostly discussed as a Star Trek parody. If all you want is a bunch of laughs and you don't want to think too hard about it, this is a good book to read.
But there's zero room to get to know the characters on a more personal level, even the protagonist, and to me this means that we miss out on the opportunity for some truly impactful humour that has deep roots in the story. Instead, we just get a series of (as I said, mostly really funny) gags.
So, I'm torn on Willful Child. It's absolutely a fun book. It's a highly entertaining pastiche of the Star Trek Original Series, with some jabs thrown in at The Next Generation and a few other sci-fi stories (I swear there's at least one or two Mass Effect jokes in there). At the same time, there's occasional moments where it seems like Erikson is trying to make a larger point with this novel- he intimated as much in a post on r/fantasy about a month ago. He also suggested that he may have overwhelmed any message the book may have had, and I can't help but agree with him. There's fleeting moments where Captain Hadrian reflects on the rot at the core of the Affiliation and human society in general (the kinds of themes with which Erikson blew my mind in Malazan), but these moments are drowned out by the increasingly absurd twists that the story takes. This may very well be intentional, to a degree- the author is no stranger to subverting narrative structures. Ultimately, I wish that Goodreads allowed me to fine tune my ratings to a decimal point- I'd actually rate the book closer to a 3.70. It's a highly amusing novel, particularly from an author whose humor normally trends towards the gallows, and it demonstrates that Erikson has quite an authorial range. At the same time, I can't help but wonder if the author intended the novel to be more, or if I'm just projecting Malazan onto this novel.
I think I might have enjoyed this book more if I liked Star Trek a lot more than I did. The book played around with a few of the tropes from the idealistic science fiction of the 60's and 70's but in a few ways I feel like it didn't quite go far enough. My biggest problem was the stereotypes for the women, I understand that the book is an homage to old school star trek, but it still seemed disingenuous to make the women characters just two dimensional creations.