A review by asriram
Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini

2.0

I was hoping that after the amazing book that was To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Pasolini would once again make an excellent novel. I was sadly disappointed. This book is what The Martian would be if you removed the science and hope and made it solely about Mark trudging across the surface of Mars, as everything just gets worse and worse for him. Seeing characters suffer in the way that they do isn’t particularly compelling for me, and the hopeful and anticipatory ending of TSiaSoS is completely lost here, with there being a moment of hope on the last page - this really doesn’t do anything for me, and I found the plot lead up to this moment of revelation extremely dull. I struggled to read this book, looking for excuses to put it down, but an intellectual desire to see if the ending was worth it was what compelled me to finish. Not particularly impressed with this novel - I hope future Fractalverse novels are more in line with the first Fractalverse novel rather than this one.