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A review by quoththegirl
Odyssey by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
2.0
I'm going to review the first three books of Robot City here, since my complaints are the same for all of them.
I inherited the first three books of the series when I got married, and both my husband and I had assumed that these were actually by Isaac Asimov. NOT SO. Asimov writes the intros, and the stories are very, very loosely set in his universe, but that's it. I was still prepared to enjoy the series...until I realized the quality was terrible.
In all fairness to the authors, a lot of the flaws may well be due to the fact that each author wrote a single book in a sprawling, interminably long story. I can only imagine the frustration in writing a chunk of story that someone else started and a third someone else would finish. The result is some of the dullest, jarring scifi I've read. The characters are, without exception, unlikable, mercurial, and wildly unpredictable and unnatural in their reactions. I never really did get a handle on them. To say the plot moved at a snail's pace is unfair to the speedier varieties of snails out there. Subplots are ignored for whole books at a time (again, understandable when books are written by different authors.) The mysteries put forward aren't particularly interesting, and I had no desire to read past the three books we already owned.
I did read the synopses for the remaining four books--yes, that's right, they managed to spin this threadbare little story out into seven books in total--and was very glad I hadn't bothered to read the rest.
This wouldn't even have warranted two stars if not for the robots themselves, who are by far and away the most interesting characters in the book, which really isn't saying much.
I inherited the first three books of the series when I got married, and both my husband and I had assumed that these were actually by Isaac Asimov. NOT SO. Asimov writes the intros, and the stories are very, very loosely set in his universe, but that's it. I was still prepared to enjoy the series...until I realized the quality was terrible.
In all fairness to the authors, a lot of the flaws may well be due to the fact that each author wrote a single book in a sprawling, interminably long story. I can only imagine the frustration in writing a chunk of story that someone else started and a third someone else would finish. The result is some of the dullest, jarring scifi I've read. The characters are, without exception, unlikable, mercurial, and wildly unpredictable and unnatural in their reactions. I never really did get a handle on them. To say the plot moved at a snail's pace is unfair to the speedier varieties of snails out there. Subplots are ignored for whole books at a time (again, understandable when books are written by different authors.) The mysteries put forward aren't particularly interesting, and I had no desire to read past the three books we already owned.
I did read the synopses for the remaining four books--yes, that's right, they managed to spin this threadbare little story out into seven books in total--and was very glad I hadn't bothered to read the rest.
This wouldn't even have warranted two stars if not for the robots themselves, who are by far and away the most interesting characters in the book, which really isn't saying much.