![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I’ve been wondering if reading only one book at a time would result in finishing books faster or at the same pace as reading two at a time. The answer would appear to be “neither”, though maybe it depends on the book. Anyway …
Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic by Terry Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So the other Terry Jones book I own besides Terry Jones' Fantastic Stories is this, which is his novelization of a PC game based on a drive-by footnote joke Douglas Adams wrote in his third H2G2 novel Life, the Universe and Everything about the Starship Titanic, which suffers from Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure (SMEF) ten seconds after launch. Jones contributed his voice for one of the game’s characters (a parrot), and Adams – who wanted to write a novel version of the game to accompany its release but had no time to do so – asked Jones if he’d do it. Jones agreed on the condition that he could write it whilst nude.
Which may or may not explain all the gratuitous sex in the story, which (apart from all the aforementioned gratuitous sex) is based on the backstory, set-up and objective of the game: Starship Titanic – created by the great architect Leovinus – has been sabotaged (in the name of insurance fraud) by removing the intelligence modules from the ship’s central AI computer. The ship crash-lands on Earth on your house, and you are invited to board the ship and locate the missing modules and restore the AI so the ship can function normally. In this story, the “players” are represented by three Earthlings – Dan, Lucy and Nettie – which is where all the gratuitous sex comes in (mainly via Lucy and a libidinous alien journalist).
Obviously, it’s difficult to review this fairly, partly because it’s essentially a quickly written computer game cash-in (Jones had three weeks to write it), and partly because it’s impossible to not compare it with Adams’ H2G2 works and Jones’ Monty Python pedigree, and inevitably it falls short of both. For the most part, I think it’s good for what it is, and better than it has any right to be. The weak link is the underdeveloped Earth characters, who mostly squabble a lot and have relationship problems that aren’t interesting. Apart from that, it’s reasonably funny and entertaining, but probably only for completists of H2G2 and/or Jones’ written work, or anyone who has ever played the PC game. If nothing else, you get an author photo of Jones sitting nude with a laptop.
Lethe by Tricia Sullivan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is my fourth time reading Tricia Sullivan, and this time it’s her debut novel, which demonstrates that even when she was first starting out, she had a very left-field approach to SF. This one takes place in 2166 – 80 years after the corporate Gene Wars have devastated Earth – where civilization is held together by the League of New Alchemists, which is run by three disembodied brains in Australia connected to a computer network that also uses altermoders (amphibious mutant humans) communicating telepathically with dolphins for extra compute power.
Meanwhile, space travel is a thing, and one of the things the “Pickled Brains” are doing is sending research ships to investigate an alien structure just outside the solar system where interstellar gates have been discovered that could lead to inhabitable planets. A League researcher named Daire falls through a new gate and finds himself on another planet with sentient trees where children don’t make it past puberty. Back on Earth, altermoder Jenae is assigned to compute the data sent back from the ship that turns out to be the key to what really happened in the Gene Wars.
So. Yes. As with Sullivan’s other books that I’ve read, there’s a lot of nifty ideas flying around with minimal exposition, so I had to spend the first few chapters getting acclimatized to the surroundings. Which is normally not a problem, but this time it was more of a struggle to get a handle on just why the Gene Wars happened in the first place and the various factions struggling for power. Even with all that, it holds together okay until the final act, which feels really rushed. For a first novel it’s alright – points for creativity and daring – and Sullivan would go from here to write some really good stuff. But I’m glad this wasn’t my starting point with her work.
View all my reviews
Gene genie,
This is dF
Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic by Terry JonesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
So the other Terry Jones book I own besides Terry Jones' Fantastic Stories is this, which is his novelization of a PC game based on a drive-by footnote joke Douglas Adams wrote in his third H2G2 novel Life, the Universe and Everything about the Starship Titanic, which suffers from Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure (SMEF) ten seconds after launch. Jones contributed his voice for one of the game’s characters (a parrot), and Adams – who wanted to write a novel version of the game to accompany its release but had no time to do so – asked Jones if he’d do it. Jones agreed on the condition that he could write it whilst nude.
Which may or may not explain all the gratuitous sex in the story, which (apart from all the aforementioned gratuitous sex) is based on the backstory, set-up and objective of the game: Starship Titanic – created by the great architect Leovinus – has been sabotaged (in the name of insurance fraud) by removing the intelligence modules from the ship’s central AI computer. The ship crash-lands on Earth on your house, and you are invited to board the ship and locate the missing modules and restore the AI so the ship can function normally. In this story, the “players” are represented by three Earthlings – Dan, Lucy and Nettie – which is where all the gratuitous sex comes in (mainly via Lucy and a libidinous alien journalist).
Obviously, it’s difficult to review this fairly, partly because it’s essentially a quickly written computer game cash-in (Jones had three weeks to write it), and partly because it’s impossible to not compare it with Adams’ H2G2 works and Jones’ Monty Python pedigree, and inevitably it falls short of both. For the most part, I think it’s good for what it is, and better than it has any right to be. The weak link is the underdeveloped Earth characters, who mostly squabble a lot and have relationship problems that aren’t interesting. Apart from that, it’s reasonably funny and entertaining, but probably only for completists of H2G2 and/or Jones’ written work, or anyone who has ever played the PC game. If nothing else, you get an author photo of Jones sitting nude with a laptop.
Lethe by Tricia SullivanMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is my fourth time reading Tricia Sullivan, and this time it’s her debut novel, which demonstrates that even when she was first starting out, she had a very left-field approach to SF. This one takes place in 2166 – 80 years after the corporate Gene Wars have devastated Earth – where civilization is held together by the League of New Alchemists, which is run by three disembodied brains in Australia connected to a computer network that also uses altermoders (amphibious mutant humans) communicating telepathically with dolphins for extra compute power.
Meanwhile, space travel is a thing, and one of the things the “Pickled Brains” are doing is sending research ships to investigate an alien structure just outside the solar system where interstellar gates have been discovered that could lead to inhabitable planets. A League researcher named Daire falls through a new gate and finds himself on another planet with sentient trees where children don’t make it past puberty. Back on Earth, altermoder Jenae is assigned to compute the data sent back from the ship that turns out to be the key to what really happened in the Gene Wars.
So. Yes. As with Sullivan’s other books that I’ve read, there’s a lot of nifty ideas flying around with minimal exposition, so I had to spend the first few chapters getting acclimatized to the surroundings. Which is normally not a problem, but this time it was more of a struggle to get a handle on just why the Gene Wars happened in the first place and the various factions struggling for power. Even with all that, it holds together okay until the final act, which feels really rushed. For a first novel it’s alright – points for creativity and daring – and Sullivan would go from here to write some really good stuff. But I’m glad this wasn’t my starting point with her work.
View all my reviews
Gene genie,
This is dF
