Reviews

This book is well written, and interesting, but not engaging. I never came to care about any of the characters and the plot took too long to develop, and so the book was never compelling. Because of this, I did not finish it before it had to go back to the library.

grayjay's review against another edition

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3.0

I would say this novel sometimakes sense and sometimes doesn't, but as it is a bit of a satire, maybe that was the point. Blending elements of cyberpunk, space opera, and noir mystery, it features three unrelated characters whose stories are connected by violence and a difficulty in controlling their own destinies.

Michael Kearney is a serial killer and physicist in the 1990s who is on the brink of a discovery that enables space travel and the future settings of the lives of the other two characters—Seria Mau a cybernetic-human disembodied consciousness piloting a stolen military ship, and Ed Chianese, a Virtual Reality junky who falls in with a circus and is put to work as a prophet.

angelicide's review against another edition

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3.0

An alternate title for this book might be, "WTF?"

I rarely have a difficult time following the plot of a book, but I had absolutely no idea what was going on here until at least two-thirds of the way in. I'm glad I finished it because, although I still don't understand everything that happened, some of the concepts I did manage to grasp were mind-blowing.

The author has a real talent for language and dialogue. His writing is, for lack of a better word, beautiful. He has problems, though, in the area of coherent storytelling. Think William Gibson on LSD.

One of my personal pet peeves involves writers failing to trust the reader and telling them too much. With this book, the pendulum definitely swung the other way. If he had been a bit less poetic and focused more on concrete details rather than dreamy, disconnected imagery, this would probably have been one of my favorite books.