Joe Johnson Writer

Category: Book Reviews

  • Pawn: A Chronicle of the Sibyl’s War

    Pawn: A Chronicle of the Sibyl’s War

    Low-level gang member Nicole Hammond spends her nights getting blackout drunk. It’s worth the constant hangovers to quiet the voices in her head. Then, one morning, she’s forced awake by her maybe-ex-boyfriend, Bungie. He’s bleeding from a bullet wound to the abdomen and wants her to drive him to the hospital. His plan is to kidnap a doctor at gunpoint for a private outpatient procedure.

    Then comes the twist: Aliens swoop in and abduct Nicole, Bungie, and the hapless doctor (don’t feel bad for him, he’s an asshole). It turns out that Nicole hears voices because she is a Sibyl, a special human who can commune with the aliens’ ship, the Fyrantha. She is put in charge of a work crew of fellow-abductees. Her new job is to listen to the ship and tell the crew what needs fixing.

    Nicole settles into this new living situation. Bungie, however, wants out. He’s looking for an angle and rebels against the status quo. His violent impulses raise some eyebrows. Plato, the leader of the human workforce, warns them that the aliens must never see humans fighting. Pure logic would suggest that he explain why. But, no, that’s being saved for the big reveal.

    In the early stages, I was excited about the prospect of a space opera starring a gang banger from Philly. This seemed like a great genre mashup. Unfortunately, Nicole’s background is little more than window dressing. We never get a real sense of what she is capable of or what she’s done. It’s so glossed over that I began to wonder if I was reading a young adult novel. Maybe the author just doesn’t know the thug life.

    But never mind. There are bigger problems that left me scratching my head.

    First, Nicole spends half the book passively reacting to everything that happens around her. Given her circumstances, she asks shockingly few questions. She simply has no agency, which makes her a frustrating viewpoint into this world. She is finally pressed into action when she stumbles upon a huge, forested arena. The ship’s overlords have set two alien species to fight to the death over limited rations. The faces of two starving alien creature children weigh heavily on Nicole’s mind. She decides to do something about it.

    I won’t reveal what happens next, except to say the mysteries of the Fyrantha take a backseat to this new conflict. All of the characters and worldbuilding we’ve established up to this point vanish. It almost feels as though the author, Timothy Zahn, cobbled this together from two short stories. I kept wondering if Nicole would round a corner and stumble into her work crew. “Where have you been?” they’d yell. This does happen eventually, but by then, everyone is afflicted with Nicole’s initial apathy. Oh well.

    The novel ends with very little resolved except to set up the next book. If this sounds lackluster, that’s because it is. Pawn is a 350-page preamble. It’s like a table-setting episode of prestige television. Not much happens until the final pages. Even then, it is only to establish what will follow. Naysayers will argue that this is the start of a trilogy, but it feels more like the first two episodes of a season-long arc.

    Look, this isn’t great fiction, but it’s a fairly brisk read. I’m curious enough about where it is going to check out the sequel. You could charitably say it left me wanting more.

  • Wool

    Wool

    An unspecified event hundreds of years ago forced humanity underground. To go out on the surface now is a death sentence, reserved only for those who commit the most terrible of crimes: Asking to leave.

    This is called being “sent out to clean.” The individual is dressed in a protective suit and given a wool cloth. They are asked to wipe off the sensors that give the Silo’s inhabitants a view of the desolate outside world. It’s a mystery why every cleaner follows through with this before they succumb and die.

    Juliette is a mechanic in the bowels of the Silo. She is too busy keeping the power on to worry about the outside world. Then, one day, the mayor of the silo descends all 144 floors of the grand staircase to make Juliette an offer: Replace the last Sheriff who went out to clean.

    As a girl from the down-deeps, Juliette has no idea about the politics at play in the floors above. No sooner does she pin on her star then she finds herself embroiled in a high-profile murder case, targeted by department heads who want her gone, and unraveling the mystery of what happened to her predecessor.

    This is a fantastic setup for a mystery story that the author, Hugh Howey, clearly has no interest in. Everything is either spelled out right away or is so heavily signposted that you can’t help but immediately connect the dots before the characters do. Then the author dumps all this and takes the story in a totally different direction.

    After doing a little digging, I discovered that Wool originally began life as a short story. The author then kept expanding it, first into a series of novellas and then finally into a novel. This makes a lot of sense and explains some of the lumpy story structure.

    More problematic are the characters, who all feel paper thin when they aren’t acting like weepy, melodramatic teenagers. There’s never any subtlety. The players pound their chests and wail and moan, their inner dialogue a seething turmoil of pithy emotions.

    I think if you took a shot of alcohol every time one of the characters starts crying, you’d be dead or comatose before the final chapter. It’s almost funny, later in the book, when they introduce a new character who is described as a stunted child in a man’s body. He acts just like everyone else.

    It doesn’t feel like anyone grows or changes. Most of the players exist simply as a plot function. You know everything about each character in just a few lines because there is nothing else to discover. The villain is so laughably obvious that he might as well appear twirling his moustache and cackling.

    This will sound like blasphemy to some, but I actually prefer what the TV adaptation is doing at this point. I feel like the writers there took these bare character sketches and breathed life into them, expanding the plot and embelishing the worldbuilding that mostly sits in the margins here.

    As something that inspired some great television, I have to give this book some grudging respect. I wouldn’t say I regret reading it. I didn’t hate it. But Wool reads like a rough draft that the show’s creators wisely edited into a great story. As such, I think I’ll stick with the show for now and give the two follow-up novels a pass.