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A review by kieralesley
The God Engines by John Scalzi
3.0
This… was not what I was expecting. The world of the God Engines is evocative and strange. The ships, the combination of priest and captain on the ships, and the wider mythology is original and quite dark straight off the bat. I love a good original mythology and I love the images Scalzi brings in here – chained gods bent to the will of believers of another, more superior god, using their captive god’s strength to journey the stars. It’s cool, dammit!
The characters are few, but they’re interestingly conflicted. I like the contrast between Tephe and his priest. I like the internal thoughts he has about how to captain his ship and deal with his god and keep everything ticking over. I like the doubts and his constant combative stand off with his captured god.
But I found it turned a corner tone and plot-wise at about the two-thirds mark and I didn’t like how it developed from there. That’s pure subjectivity. Scalzi drove his concepts right to the end of the line here and cranked the action and the tension on right through the ending, escalating repeatedly over where I thought the “top end” of the stakes and action were. It was phenomenal charting where he started and where he ended up and in hindsight the progression felt inevitable. I just didn’t much like where he went with it.
I found the pacing a little uneven as well, with a lot of time spent on the first half in set up and conversations and a whole lot of rapid escalation and stakes coming in out of nowhere in the second half.
Not a bad book, I liked it mostly, but too uneven an experience for me to give it much more than that.
The characters are few, but they’re interestingly conflicted. I like the contrast between Tephe and his priest. I like the internal thoughts he has about how to captain his ship and deal with his god and keep everything ticking over. I like the doubts and his constant combative stand off with his captured god.
But I found it turned a corner tone and plot-wise at about the two-thirds mark and I didn’t like how it developed from there. That’s pure subjectivity. Scalzi drove his concepts right to the end of the line here and cranked the action and the tension on right through the ending, escalating repeatedly over where I thought the “top end” of the stakes and action were. It was phenomenal charting where he started and where he ended up and in hindsight the progression felt inevitable. I just didn’t much like where he went with it.
I found the pacing a little uneven as well, with a lot of time spent on the first half in set up and conversations and a whole lot of rapid escalation and stakes coming in out of nowhere in the second half.
Not a bad book, I liked it mostly, but too uneven an experience for me to give it much more than that.