ZB7

It’s very much a thumbs in the middle book. It didn’t blow me away, but it also didn’t bother me so much that I stopped reading. In other words, I wouldn’t recommend picking it up if you have a huge stack of other books that you haven’t yet gotten to. But if you have a few spare hours, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to occupy your time.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

Generation ship Argonos has travelled deep space for centuries looking for signs of life. By the time of this story, it's been years since their last visit on a planet. A strange signal lures Argonos to a distant planet, where the remains of a colony are found. There are no survivors, but instead something else, something rather creepy...

However, finding the planet is only a beginning. There's unrest among the passengers of the ship and then there's the question of another signal... Things get quite spooky, in a rather quiet and subtle way. This is not an action-packed story, but contains lots of quiet suspense. Some reviews claim the book leaves too many things unresolved and while that's true to some extent, it didn't bother me.

This book was originally published in US as Ship of Fools. Unto Leviathan is the British edition published by Orbit.

(Original review in my review blog) ( )

This is a dark, creepy space opera. The setup is a ship that has been traveling around randomly for generations -- possibly thousands of years. Then they find a human colony, but everyone is dead.

This was a page turner. Highly recommended. Think Rendezvous with Rama, if Neil Gaiman had written it. ( )

I'm forced to admit that this is one book I did judge by its cover, if only because the cover had so many things wrong with it. Beginning with the not-quite-but-almost-spoilerish blurb, moving on to the New York Times review quote on the back that seems to almost entirely miss the point; followed by the listing of the author's name on the front cover AND spine as "Philip K. Dick award-winning author Richard Paul Russo", with Philip K. Dick almost as big as Richard Paul Russo; then the generic "big spaceship" cover art; then an entirely superfluous two word review from the Romantic Times. (I never trust any book review consisting only of an adjectival phrase, as I can never quite escape the suspicion that the rest of the sentence read "This book is not....")

Anyway....

Once I opened the book, I was, if not "riveted intensely" at least fairly caught up. The base story (people find alien artifact, Things Start To Go Wrong) is well done, and Russo incorporates some other interesting elements. We have a generation ship eons out from its (long forgotten) origin; questions of faith and belief raised through the interactions between the non-believing narrator, a sympathetic devout priest, and her cynical and corrupt bishop; a touch of class conflict; and a deformed narrator. Actually that last did seem somewhat unnecessary, but Bartolomeo Aguilera, as he is rather awkwardly named, makes so little of his deformities that this isn't really an issue.

Russo does a fine job of capturing the sense of alien mystery inherent in first contact, but although the book is competently written and packs a fair punch in terms of plot twists and turns, it all seems something of a well trodden path. Whilst reading I was reminded of Heinlein's generation ships, Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, elements of a Star Wars novel of which I forget the name, a short story by Campbell, and, most frequently, Michael Crichton's Sphere. None of this is bad, but the book read to me like a decades old classic that's been heavily influential, but that most people remember for the film version. The book was in fact written in 2001, and there hasn't been a film yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one, given that parts of the book seem written with the screenplay in mind - perhaps why Sphere kept coming to mind.

I'm not going to detail plot specifics as I think it's the sort of book approached knowing as little as possible. I'd recommend it to anyone who values gradual suspense over pure action, but I just can't help feeling it'd have been better thirty years ago. ( )