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rocketiza's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed this a lot until the latter part of the book which seemed to drag on without really giving the reader as much as it should have.
tasharobinson's review against another edition
2.0
I picked this up because I ran across a webcomic praising it to the skies, and claiming it was a satirical feminist twist on the old "surviving a spaceship crash and restarting civilization on a new world" trope, where the men immediately wanted to repopulate the planet, and the women stood up to them and claimed autonomy over their bodies. That sounded amazing, and I wanted to see where that premise went.
But that's not what the book is about at all. It's about a group that survives a spaceship crash and then has to deal with the fact that one of their number is a crazy, bitter nihilist who resents their every effort at survival. The book does change up the usual trope, but it focuses on that nihilist's point of view fairly exclusively, without making her particularly comprehensible to people who don't share her views. The characters largely seem like familiar types, but they behave so oddly that roughly every other page was a "Wait, what?" moment for me. And then there are these flashes of lucidity that seemed like they'd go somewhere fascinating — like when the youngest, strongest man realizes he can just hit the woman who's leading the party, and win the latest argument that way, and all the survivors have to decide what to do about it — but those lines of inquiry just peter out entirely. The last half of the book feels stretched out and arbitrary, and doesn't do much with the protagonist to justify her choices, or the story's direction.
But that's not what the book is about at all. It's about a group that survives a spaceship crash and then has to deal with the fact that one of their number is a crazy, bitter nihilist who resents their every effort at survival. The book does change up the usual trope, but it focuses on that nihilist's point of view fairly exclusively, without making her particularly comprehensible to people who don't share her views. The characters largely seem like familiar types, but they behave so oddly that roughly every other page was a "Wait, what?" moment for me. And then there are these flashes of lucidity that seemed like they'd go somewhere fascinating — like when the youngest, strongest man realizes he can just hit the woman who's leading the party, and win the latest argument that way, and all the survivors have to decide what to do about it — but those lines of inquiry just peter out entirely. The last half of the book feels stretched out and arbitrary, and doesn't do much with the protagonist to justify her choices, or the story's direction.
lark_spur's review against another edition
4.0
If you like Russ's work you will like this. Very heady stuff.
tsghoulfriend's review against another edition
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
paolacanalesl's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
jazzypizzaz's review against another edition
4.0
Russ, whew, a dazzling intellect... this little book packs a punch. I can't claim to have understood it, but I know I'll be looking up reviews/articles later.
eccles's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
Picked this up as a curiosity, following the traces of a few now-forgotten bright lights of 1970s sci-fi. As someone else has commented, this is basically an extended suicide note in space, the monologue of someone about to die on a planet far far away. The fact that she’s been wrecked on a distant planet in some distant future in which tesseracts exist and science seems to have overcome all human problems is largely incidental to the central focus of this work, which is preoccupied, I think, with how to die. The scenario is a survival story trope: a handful of disparate people thrown together when they’re wrecked on a desert island, not a million miles from Lord of the Flies or a high-tech Gillian’s Island really. But here the hapless crew are cast away, as the result of a glitch in some kind of high-tech space travel, somewhere so far away as to make rescue perfectly unimaginable. As a consequence, they’re confronted with the choice of starting civilisation all over or just dying sooner rather than later. Our realistic and nihilistic first person narrator has decided from the beginning that they’re already dead and it’s just a matter of playing out how death happens for all of them. In fact, and I suppose inevitably, she just kills them all and then spends the last third of the book musing on life the universe and everything as she starves to death. It’s bleak, and it’s angry. Angry about the bleakness of life, of the human experience, of how society looks when it’s stripped back to the bone. There’s no attempt to create a coherent sense of a future world, and amid the passing references to magical technology of this future, 1970’s America is clearly visible. Because the text is the musings of one person, recorded on her “vodocorder” as she moves through her dance of death, I found the monotone became monotonous. I’m not sure this exercise shed any new or interesting light on the human condition, but maybe writing doesn’t need to. But what’s left is pretty emotionally exhausting.
alyssands's review against another edition
challenging
dark
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75