You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Most of the action takes place in a spaceship, and you never get a clear idea of how it's set up, plus there are all these sort of virtual-reality things going on at the same time, and the vampire guy tends to hide out in his room and you don't really know where that is, and I think there are supposed to be some kind of tents that the people live in? On a spaceship? I don't know.Īnyway, it's not that a book has to be easy to read I like books that are complicated, but I think it's the mark of a good writer that you shouldn't have to be wondering where the aft thruster maintenance room is instead of just being engrossed in the story.Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. The other problem I had with this book was that it was hard to picture exactly where everyone was and what they were doing in whatever scene.
We don't really get to know much else about them, or at least not by page 183. So as a result, we know that one guy is a vampire, and another guy has some kind of prosthetic senses, and there's a military woman and another woman with a multiple personality. Especially if the story is told in the first person by this character. It's certainly a gutsy choice to have a person with no empathy as your main character, but it's pretty hard to get readers to care about someone who has only a vaguely intellectual interest in other people. Okay, I gave this book TWO second chances because I had heard great things about it, but I eventually gave up.
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