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A review by megapolisomancy
Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen
2.0
Pros: McMullen has a lot of really great ideas. This is a book set 200 years after the apocalypse, caused by a mysterious siren call that started luring people into the sea, leading to nuclear war and the placement of satellites that sweep the earth with electromagnetic pulses from time to time, prohibiting the use of electronics. The story, then, concerns the southern part of Australia (I think-the geography is hazy at best), where they have a produced a new calculating machine that uses people as binary components. Oh also an ancient net of nanomachines has started constructing a mirror in the sky to prevent global warming. This is a holdover from the pre-Apocalyptic world, of course, but I forget why it has started up again 2000 years in the future.
Cons: McMullen doesn't have a clue what to do with any of these ideas. None of them are fleshed out to any degree and their implications are never really explored. The characters (such as they are) and the plot (such as it is) clearly exist only to propel the reader along as McMullen careens from one idea to the next, which are often clearly just crammed into the narrative as he thought of them for the first time. (My favorite example of this: around page 300, it's explained that some people have bird DNA [don't ask:]. From there for the next 15 pages or so, one of the main characters is described as having bushy or feathery hair on just about every paragraph. This had never been mentioned in the prior 300 pages).
It's hard to convey here how poorly organized and structured this book is. Characters fall in and out of love immediately. They betray one another for the thinnest of reasons even more often (one such betrayal, toward the end of the book, isn't explained at all, as far as I could see). Pages will be spent on the most boring minutiae, and then McMullen will oftenhandedly reference the passage of 5 years. (or, another favorite example, after the first inexplicable betrayal that the plot hinges on, two characters ride into the desert to search for a third... and then the chapter is over and it's 5 years later and one is a monk and the other is a warlord). I could go on and on. There were a lot of head-scratchers in this book... and there weren't supposed to be.
Oh, one other thing: when I started this, I was stoked on the fact that all of the main characters were strong and sympathetic females... until he started writing about their breasts as their main identifying characteristics (not kidding). Then by the end it turned out that the philandering man was the main hero/character after all. Bah.
The more I write the more I'm convinced that this deserved 1 star, but I really enjoyed a few bits of it and I'm feeling generous. Let's pretend it's a 1.5
Cons: McMullen doesn't have a clue what to do with any of these ideas. None of them are fleshed out to any degree and their implications are never really explored. The characters (such as they are) and the plot (such as it is) clearly exist only to propel the reader along as McMullen careens from one idea to the next, which are often clearly just crammed into the narrative as he thought of them for the first time. (My favorite example of this: around page 300, it's explained that some people have bird DNA [don't ask:]. From there for the next 15 pages or so, one of the main characters is described as having bushy or feathery hair on just about every paragraph. This had never been mentioned in the prior 300 pages).
It's hard to convey here how poorly organized and structured this book is. Characters fall in and out of love immediately. They betray one another for the thinnest of reasons even more often (one such betrayal, toward the end of the book, isn't explained at all, as far as I could see). Pages will be spent on the most boring minutiae, and then McMullen will oftenhandedly reference the passage of 5 years. (or, another favorite example, after the first inexplicable betrayal that the plot hinges on, two characters ride into the desert to search for a third... and then the chapter is over and it's 5 years later and one is a monk and the other is a warlord). I could go on and on. There were a lot of head-scratchers in this book... and there weren't supposed to be.
Oh, one other thing: when I started this, I was stoked on the fact that all of the main characters were strong and sympathetic females... until he started writing about their breasts as their main identifying characteristics (not kidding). Then by the end it turned out that the philandering man was the main hero/character after all. Bah.
The more I write the more I'm convinced that this deserved 1 star, but I really enjoyed a few bits of it and I'm feeling generous. Let's pretend it's a 1.5