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knowledgelost's review
2.0
The Empire State is dying due to the fissure connecting this reality to New York disappearing. The populace is in a panic, demanding the return of prohibition and rationing of energy. Meanwhile in 1954 New York there has been a dynamic political change. A new group called Atoms for Peace are preparing a robot army for a trans-dimensional invasion. Their goal: total conquest – or destruction – of the Empire State.
Private Investigator Rad Bradley is back in the sequel to Empire State. This time the twisted parallel prohibition-era New York City is falling apart and a robot army are planning to invade. Adam Christopher spent a lot of time building this amazing inter-dimensional city with some wacky atomic age technology and doppelgangers; in Empire State he has this brilliant tech noir story happening which I really enjoyed. But then we get to The Age Atomic and all noir elements have gone and the plot just feels like a generic atomic age thriller.
The world building he has done to give up this trans-dimensional New York is great and Rad Bradley is a wonderful character, so I can understand why he would want to stay in this world. I just think I was expecting another neo-noir type novel but was left we a pretty average science fiction thriller. The term ‘killing your darlings’ is often used and I’m wondering if Christopher should have just used the same world and created new characters. The return of Rad Bradley (an obvious homage to Ray Bradbury) just meant I expected more hard-boiled adventures from him.
I love this world but I’m very disappointed with the way this book turned out, I think Adam Christopher has the skills and tools to write great alternative reality or neo-noir novels but for me I think the genre switch left me dissatisfied. I recommend you read Empire State and if you are planning to continue to series, be warned, it’s not the same. I’m pleased to see that Adam Christopher added his writing and editing soundtrack again. This book could have been better, I will have to check out WorldBuilder again and see what other people have done with this world, since that is the most interesting part of the whole book.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/03/11/book-review-the-age-atomic/
Private Investigator Rad Bradley is back in the sequel to Empire State. This time the twisted parallel prohibition-era New York City is falling apart and a robot army are planning to invade. Adam Christopher spent a lot of time building this amazing inter-dimensional city with some wacky atomic age technology and doppelgangers; in Empire State he has this brilliant tech noir story happening which I really enjoyed. But then we get to The Age Atomic and all noir elements have gone and the plot just feels like a generic atomic age thriller.
The world building he has done to give up this trans-dimensional New York is great and Rad Bradley is a wonderful character, so I can understand why he would want to stay in this world. I just think I was expecting another neo-noir type novel but was left we a pretty average science fiction thriller. The term ‘killing your darlings’ is often used and I’m wondering if Christopher should have just used the same world and created new characters. The return of Rad Bradley (an obvious homage to Ray Bradbury) just meant I expected more hard-boiled adventures from him.
I love this world but I’m very disappointed with the way this book turned out, I think Adam Christopher has the skills and tools to write great alternative reality or neo-noir novels but for me I think the genre switch left me dissatisfied. I recommend you read Empire State and if you are planning to continue to series, be warned, it’s not the same. I’m pleased to see that Adam Christopher added his writing and editing soundtrack again. This book could have been better, I will have to check out WorldBuilder again and see what other people have done with this world, since that is the most interesting part of the whole book.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/03/11/book-review-the-age-atomic/
tachyondecay's review
2.0
I am so behind on my Angry Robot subscription. It’s bad, guys. I read Empire State 3 years ago, and The Age Atomic came out half a year later. I barely remember the first book—no, that’s a lie; I had entirely forgotten the first book. I remembered exactly none of the characters when Adam Christopher reintroduced them here. But the vague memories that I stir up from reading my review suggest that these two books are fairly disjoint.
If Empire State was a noir mystery built into a pocket universe, The Age Atomic is nukepunk baked into a thriller crust. Rad Bradley teams up with Jennifer Jones, who has spunk, and they tangle with some humans-turned-robots, and bad things happen. Meanwhile, in the New York side of things, Nimrod tries to figure out why a Doc Manhattan wannabe, Evelyn McHale, wants to destroy the universe.
So it goes.
Whereas Empire State had a fairly deep mystery to drive it, the sequel lacks that energy. Despite the literal chill enveloping the Empire State, most of the urgency in this plot comes from the main characters running away from bad guys. Don’t get me wrong—that’s a great way to add a sense of urgency. But the plot, meanwhile, plods along in the background.
I never cared strongly about any of the characters or their problems. For one thing, even though Jennifer’s motive for slumming it with people like Rad is so she can find her brother, we don’t learn much about her beyond that. Similarly, aside from a few sentences to remind us of his backstory, Rad remains opaque. The character development here is underwhelming, at best.
I guess the most impressive part of The Age Atomic is the surfeit of wise-cracking crazy anachronistic atomic-powered robots. And that is cool. But it’s cool in the way sugary kids’ breakfast cereal is cool: it tastes good and fills you up but is bad for you and leaves you hungrier in an hour. There are so many fascinating ideas here, sure. Yet they all feel like echoes of ideas that have shown up everywhere else already and been explored more deeply by those authors. Ghosts and transdimensional fissures and robots and nuclear madmen? I shouldn’t be yawning, but the way these ideas burst at the seams of The Age Atomic means Christopher can’t spend much time on many of them.
I powered through this like one of Christopher’s robot creations: single-minded but disinterestedly. To say this is a bad book oversimplifies things. It’s not what I consider a good read, but it’s more like one of those movies where the writer/director has tried to do something cool and you’re just not into it. In my previous review I commended Christopher for taking risks even if they don’t pay off, and I’ll echo that comment here. The Age Atomic is not for me, and maybe Christopher himself is not the writer for me. But I’m open to trying him again, later down the line, and seeing if that changes.
If Empire State was a noir mystery built into a pocket universe, The Age Atomic is nukepunk baked into a thriller crust. Rad Bradley teams up with Jennifer Jones, who has spunk, and they tangle with some humans-turned-robots, and bad things happen. Meanwhile, in the New York side of things, Nimrod tries to figure out why a Doc Manhattan wannabe, Evelyn McHale, wants to destroy the universe.
So it goes.
Whereas Empire State had a fairly deep mystery to drive it, the sequel lacks that energy. Despite the literal chill enveloping the Empire State, most of the urgency in this plot comes from the main characters running away from bad guys. Don’t get me wrong—that’s a great way to add a sense of urgency. But the plot, meanwhile, plods along in the background.
I never cared strongly about any of the characters or their problems. For one thing, even though Jennifer’s motive for slumming it with people like Rad is so she can find her brother, we don’t learn much about her beyond that. Similarly, aside from a few sentences to remind us of his backstory, Rad remains opaque. The character development here is underwhelming, at best.
I guess the most impressive part of The Age Atomic is the surfeit of wise-cracking crazy anachronistic atomic-powered robots. And that is cool. But it’s cool in the way sugary kids’ breakfast cereal is cool: it tastes good and fills you up but is bad for you and leaves you hungrier in an hour. There are so many fascinating ideas here, sure. Yet they all feel like echoes of ideas that have shown up everywhere else already and been explored more deeply by those authors. Ghosts and transdimensional fissures and robots and nuclear madmen? I shouldn’t be yawning, but the way these ideas burst at the seams of The Age Atomic means Christopher can’t spend much time on many of them.
I powered through this like one of Christopher’s robot creations: single-minded but disinterestedly. To say this is a bad book oversimplifies things. It’s not what I consider a good read, but it’s more like one of those movies where the writer/director has tried to do something cool and you’re just not into it. In my previous review I commended Christopher for taking risks even if they don’t pay off, and I’ll echo that comment here. The Age Atomic is not for me, and maybe Christopher himself is not the writer for me. But I’m open to trying him again, later down the line, and seeing if that changes.
tomasthanes's review
2.0
Despite the fact that this book was about lots of robots early in the Atomic Age, I found this story hard to follow. Some of the "jumps" were bigger than others. At one point, a robot is fighting a ghost in the zeppelin and when the ghost somehow joined Kane I never determined. That made the enjoyment of the story challenging.
There was one typo at location 4434 in the Kindle edition of the book: "appliances" should've been "ambulances".
There was one typo at location 4434 in the Kindle edition of the book: "appliances" should've been "ambulances".
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