David Ramirez (1)

At first this seems like your basic generational space ship journey to a new planet. The people on board the ship are equipped with brain implants at adolescence, which boost their psychic powers to amazing levels, and they are tested in order to be placed on the job tracks for which they are most suited. It's a rigid society, but it's one that will enable them to not only survive the lengthy journey, but deliver a thriving population to their destination.

Hana has just come back from show more Breeding Duty, a 9 month, fully-sedated and fully-paid vacation. She's having trouble easing back into her life and she's having strange longings to hold her baby--something she'll never do because it's the job of Keepers to raise children and her job is in City Planning. Her friends throw her a party to welcome her back, and not long after, Leon Barrens, her Peace Officer bruiser friend asks her to help him solve a mystery.

There are deaths occurring all over the ship. Horrible deaths, in which there is nothing left of the body but tattered pieces. And there are strange sightings of impossible monstrous creatures. He wants to know what's going on, and she wants to help him. As their love blossoms and the mystery deepens, they find themselves at odds with their society and running for their lives.

There was so much I liked about this book. There were mysteries on top of mysteries, secrets that were too much for anyone to bear, and histories that had to be hidden. Hana's journey was fascinating to me, from her initial longings for her child, to her determination to protect everyone from knowledge that could destroy everything, and her eventual transformation. Barrens was just my type, the stoic hero I enjoy reading about. I always enjoy the trope of becoming what you hate/fear and this book does that trope extremely well. Great stuff.

(Provided by publisher) show less

[Cross-posted to Knite Writes]

This book is dense. Really dense. And really long. I have somewhat conflicted feelings about that, but it’s going to take me a while to really explain everything, so I’m going to start from the beginning and go from there.

I thought the beginning of the story was too drawn out. Starting at around 35% (according to my Kindle), the book finally started to pick up. The lead-in was too long for my tastes, and there were times when I was afraid it would never pick show more up, that all the book had to offer was a couple characters running programs and having sex (the romance angle was emphasized heavily, especially in the first half of the book). Thankfully, I didn’t give up, and after that point, I was thoroughly hooked.

Not that the first 35% is boring, per say. It’s filled with rich world-building (richer even than the world-building in The Waking Engine) and dizzying descriptions of fantastical sci-fi elements that I found incredibly interesting. But the stakes in the story didn’t become apparent fast enough. There was little escalation in the plot until it hit that 35% stride, and I started feeling the strain of a stagnate and repetitive plot sequence on my patience at around 20%. If I had to choose the worst aspect of reading The Forever Watch, it would be the long beginning.

Additionally, I felt that the descriptions of the technology were too thorough, so thorough that I got lost in them and skimmed many of them because it would have made no difference whether I read them or not — full understanding of science (even the sci-fi science) was beyond me. It occasionally made my head spin. My favorite descriptions were of the psychic abilities of the characters and their connections to one another and the future internet dubbed the Nth Web. Those were generally well done. It was mostly the descriptions of what Hana and the AI program were doing that really through me for a loop. Some of them were too scientific for my tastes. Too long. Too much of a deviation from the main plot.

On the other hand, what a world Ramirez built. I was impressed by Edison’s imagination in The Waking Engine, but the world of The Forever Watch blew me away. Everything about it, from the technology to the style of government to the psychic powers…everything was carefully thought out and fully described. There was no confusion about who could do what why, and information is continually revealed to the reader at a pace that makes it easy to digest. There are no massive info-dumps or overloads. Every aspect of the world makes sense — and I imagine writing the story that way was no easy task, considering the depth of Ramirez’s world-building.

Also, despite the slow beginning, the plot was excellent. I did guess the ending a while ahead of time — because I’ve seen that ending before — but it didn’t make the story any less enjoyable. One of the best things about the plot was the use of gray morality. There’s no black and white, heroes versus villains, or right versus wrong going on in this book. The somewhat science-based caste system and its mostly faceless leaders may strike you as the obvious “villain,” but as the plot becomes complex and more is revealed, the simplicity of that idea is destroyed. Then you really have to think about the situation. No simple answer is given.

Basically, this book was excellent but had a few structural flaws that lessened my enjoyment somewhat. show less

I picked this up based on the jacket blurb. I thought it would be interesting but probably not great. It was interesting and great. The jacket blurb just about scratches the surface of the story. I'll not give a long plot exposition here as others have already done that. Some thought the opening was slow but I rather liked the slow evolving relationship of Hana and Barrens, two people so unlike each other but drawn together through the mystery they are trying to solve. The jacket says there show more is a mass murderer on the generation ship, Noah, that they call home. This is the part of the story that puzzled me in the beginning. But as Hana and Barrens dig more deeply into lost areas of the huge ship and more deeply into the immense computer power it contains, I got more and more interested. The author keeps it so that we, the readers, don't know anything more than Hana and Barrens know. And really only what Hana understands since the story is told through her perspective. The descriptions of the ship and the habitats in it were compelling. Even the parts that just described Hana's job in City Planning, writing and reading reports, meeting with staff, planning a new pumping project that will save a few percentage points of energy were interesting because it made the world they inhabited more real. The Noah has a long trip, over a 1,000 years of which only 300 or so has gone bye. The mystical Builders made choices in how society would be structured, how knowledge would be passed down, on who would know what, so that people could survive a 1,000 year long journey. But those choices are breaking down.

The killer, Mincemeat, that Hana and Barrens think they are trailing is so much more complicated than a simple serial killer. There are horrible secrets on board the Noah, secrets that hardly anyone knows, secrets that the Builders deliberately kept hidden so that the Mission (to reach a new world) could go on. Hana and Barrens go underground and let some secrets out, but it's the larger picture, the real horrors that remain secret that threaten to destroy the fabric of society and maybe even the Noah itself.

The ending was plausible, given the world Ramirez builds. And it was a real ending. I don't mean to say that there is not room for a sequel, certainly there is, but it there isn't the book had a satisfying conclusion. All in all, a great hard sci fi novel. show less

Set on a vast generation starship called the Noah, midway through its centuries-long journey to the distant planet of Canaan, The Forever Watch follows City Planning Administrator Hana Dempsey and policeman Leon Barrens as they try to solve a puzzling mystery that blows up into a vast conspiracy.

Awakening after months in a coma as part of her Breeding Duty, Hana Dempsey feels a strange sense of loss that cuts through the tranquillisers. The Behaviouralist she sees before leaving the clinic show more assures her this is normal spill over from the telepathic bond with her unseen child and discharges her without any further concerns. But even after returning to her normal life as a planner, Hana can't shake the feeling that something is badly wrong so when her friend Barrens asks for her help with an intriguing cold crime, she is only too willing to help.

In the early stages of the book we get a great deal of information dumped on us about the strange world aboard the Noah and its post-human inhabitants. Prompted by her face in the mirror, Hana's first response after waking is to reminisce about the first time she saw herself after the installation of her implants. These pervade her brain and some of her body, fanning out over her face, overlaying parts of it with chrome in keeping with her particular abilities, most of which have an aura of magic about them.

Thus Hana is an extremely gifted telekinetic, with some ability to read and manipulate the thoughts of others, whose day job involves the mental manipulation of plastech, a substance that can be turned into almost anything by a person with sufficient willpower and fine control. Barrens, in total contrast, is a classic bruiser who lacks most of Hana's remote skills but whose ability to tailor his metabolism and biochemistry makes him preternaturally swift and strong. And while both, like everyone aboard the Noah to some degree, have internal reserves of psionics that they can call on through their implants, use of amplifiers that tap into the fields of energy that flow through the ship to the point where their abilities become so great that Hana is able to construct an entire apartment building on her own in an afternoon.

The puzzle part of the plot begins with a memory: Barrens arriving at the apartment of a former colleague where, after breaking the door down, he finds his mentor dead and gruesomely dismembered, presumably after his cold case investigation into the Mincemeat killer made too much progress. Intrigued by the puzzle and brought together by the sharing of the memory, Hana embarks on an affair with Barrens, much to the disapproval of her friends, working with him to develop a self-modifying computer program to search the Nth Web, the Noah's version of the internet, for information about the murderer.

Through Hana's eyes and through the reactions of her friends, we get a very clear feeling for just how calcified and stratified society is on the Noah. Hana, as one of the ruling class - she is mission-critical but failed to be selected for the elite Command Officer School, possibly as a result of oversleeping on the day of her data structures exam - is essentially a bureaucrat spending much of her time working on reports for projects which promise fractional improvements on the efficiency of the Noah's already highly optimised systems, while socialising with friends from her college days, all of whom occupy the same sort of rarified levels in different ministries.

Barrens, as cop and a bruiser, is close to blue collar and consequently the subject of much in the way of snobbish mockery on the part of Hana's school friends. And despite everything, his job too seems to be curiously routine: crimes are solved by reading perfect machine memories from peoples' implants and, when the perpetrators are identified, sending them off for Adjustment by a Behaviouralist - essentially a psionic form of brainwashing that runs the spectrum, starting with the minor tweaking of motivations and going all the way up to a psychic lobotomy that leaves the person not much more than a puppet. And on the rare occasion when a crime can't be solved immediately, all the police have to do is wait for the criminal to die and wait for their memories are uploaded to cold case database.

As the Barrens' and Hana's pursuit of the killer gathers pace, their sprawling data-mining program, which they nickname the Monster, starts to uncover a whole range of dirty secrets during its search for information on Mincemeat. They soon learn that the killings go back much further than anyone thought and that the deaths appear to be linked to strange grey monsters seen haunting the Noah's sewers. They discover that the early retirement program, which appears to be largely random with some people being pensioned off almost as soon as their careers have begun, may be being used by the sinister Ministry of Information as a cover for something else.

The Forever Watch is an exciting mix of hard SF - Ramirez is very good on the details of networking technology and computer programs - with weird almost psychic psionic powers added in for good measure. The Brave New World society of the Noah is well imagined and, in keeping with Huxley, obviously intended to keep its inhabitants passive and busy for the duration of the voyage. Unlike Huxley, Ramirez intrusion comes from within rather than without in the form of the Mincemeat murderer, only for the killer to turn out to be the tip of a very large iceberg.

While there are some moments that don't quite convince - I thought Hana's discovery of the Noah's origins might have provoked a slightly more substantial reaction than simple casual acceptance - I liked the book very much and it hit many of my favourite buttons. show less