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A review by theaurochs
After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun
3.0
A fairly entertaining sci-fi thriller that ultimately suffers for throwing too many elements into the mix and not really knowing what to do with them. This is seriously not helped by the style of delivery, meaning that even at the 90% mark in the book, we are still introducing new elements and having them explained either directly to us, or by one character to another. Getting so bogged down in exposition allows precious little time for plot development, so when that does happen it tends to feel rushed and squeezed in; nothing really gets the time it needs to breathe. Because of the widely disparate themes of everything that's being thrown together, none of it manages to really coalesce into something more meaningful.
Sometime in the near future, a massive solar flare wipes out the vast majority of electronics on the planet, and most of those in orbit. Only a narrow band around the equator is spared, thanks to shielding from the Earth's magnetosphere. As such, Nigeria is one of the few countries with remaining infrastructure, and forms the setting for the novel. The impetus for part of the plot is that one astronaut is left stranded on the ISS after the flare, and several goverments around the world (or what's left of them) pool together their resources to build a new launch site in Nigeria in order to save this astronaut. There's frankly a lot of problems with this set-up; whether it's possible to build a launch system from scratch in a little over a year, whether that's a good use of funds when the rest of the world has collapsed around you in order to save just one person, it's sketchy at best but let's accept it for the sake of the plot. The more major problem is that the book doesn't seem to want to tell that story- it instead focuses primarily on some mysterious goings on in and around Kano, that tie in to some strange archaeological finds. It really feels like these two threads needed to be woven together a little more strongly, as it stands they feel like the sketches of two separate books that have been stitched together.
Both threads are interesting, but next to each other they neither have the room they need to really be explored in detail. This is before we get to the side plots with the freedom fighters or the famous actors or the politicians (three separate threads). And they are all touching on so many interesting themes; from African cultural heritage and the importance of honouring the past as well as the future to cultural and racial identity, interesting sci-fi inventions (even if these make no sense in the timeframes given or even in relation to each other), the effects of celebrity, ancient cultures and the magic they may have wielded. There is cool stuff here and I feel like Olukotun is frustratingly close to tying it all together into something much greater. Give the ideas room to breathe, let them show themselves through the narrative rather than simply info-dumping them to us, and we'd have a great novel.
The characters are fine- main character nothing to write home about and in many ways feels like a pretty standard action film protagonist. The book overall reads far too action-filmy, complete with opening James-Bond style chase across a building site and a telescope array, not to mention the whole space station falling out of the sky element. Some of the side characters though do have a bit more humanity to them, but we rarely get to spend enough time with them to see more than one or two notes, and far too often they're again relegated to dispensing exposition.
Not a bad book and pretty interesting, just unable to pull all of it's thoughts into something coherent.
Sometime in the near future, a massive solar flare wipes out the vast majority of electronics on the planet, and most of those in orbit. Only a narrow band around the equator is spared, thanks to shielding from the Earth's magnetosphere. As such, Nigeria is one of the few countries with remaining infrastructure, and forms the setting for the novel. The impetus for part of the plot is that one astronaut is left stranded on the ISS after the flare, and several goverments around the world (or what's left of them) pool together their resources to build a new launch site in Nigeria in order to save this astronaut. There's frankly a lot of problems with this set-up; whether it's possible to build a launch system from scratch in a little over a year, whether that's a good use of funds when the rest of the world has collapsed around you in order to save just one person, it's sketchy at best but let's accept it for the sake of the plot. The more major problem is that the book doesn't seem to want to tell that story- it instead focuses primarily on some mysterious goings on in and around Kano, that tie in to some strange archaeological finds. It really feels like these two threads needed to be woven together a little more strongly, as it stands they feel like the sketches of two separate books that have been stitched together.
Both threads are interesting, but next to each other they neither have the room they need to really be explored in detail. This is before we get to the side plots with the freedom fighters or the famous actors or the politicians (three separate threads). And they are all touching on so many interesting themes; from African cultural heritage and the importance of honouring the past as well as the future to cultural and racial identity, interesting sci-fi inventions (even if these make no sense in the timeframes given or even in relation to each other), the effects of celebrity, ancient cultures and the magic they may have wielded. There is cool stuff here and I feel like Olukotun is frustratingly close to tying it all together into something much greater. Give the ideas room to breathe, let them show themselves through the narrative rather than simply info-dumping them to us, and we'd have a great novel.
The characters are fine- main character nothing to write home about and in many ways feels like a pretty standard action film protagonist. The book overall reads far too action-filmy, complete with opening James-Bond style chase across a building site and a telescope array, not to mention the whole space station falling out of the sky element. Some of the side characters though do have a bit more humanity to them, but we rarely get to spend enough time with them to see more than one or two notes, and far too often they're again relegated to dispensing exposition.
Not a bad book and pretty interesting, just unable to pull all of it's thoughts into something coherent.