This book contains several elements which I like very much: it's epistolatory, it has mysterious ancient sophisticated machinery, and it involves very big size differences. I love miniature things and people, but I also love giants and giant things. This novel is entirely in the form of interviews, and it begins with a young girl walking in the woods who falls into a sinkhole, and lands in the palm of a GIANT HAND. (I can't believe that image isn't on the cover, because it's so striking and is also by far the best part of the book.) The gigantic hand is metal, and it turns out that there are pieces of a complete ancient giant robot scattered all over the world! What happens when the whole giant robot is assembled?

It turns out that what happens is yet another example of a great idea making a bad book, largely - AGAIN - by failing to engage with the premise! WHY IS THIS SO COMMON????

To be fair, this book has many bad elements which do not involve failing to lean into its premise.

The entire book consists of interviews by an unnamed, very mysterious person with near-infinite money and power. He is hiring people to locate the robot parts, assemble them, and pilot it. He also conducts personal interviews with them in which he pries into their love lives in a bizarrely personal manner. It's clearly because the author wanted to have a love story (he shouldn't have, it's terrible) and figured this was the only way to do it and keep the format, but it makes no sense. The interviewers do object to this line of questioning, but not in the way that I kept wanting them to, which would have been along the lines of "Don't you have anything better to do than get wank material from your employees? Drop it, or I'll go to HR."

The girl who fell into the hand grows up to be a physicist who gets hired to... I forget what exactly, but it didn't make much sense even when I was reading it. Anyway, she's on the project. There's also a badass female helicopter pilot, and a male linguist to translate the mysterious giant robot inscriptions. All these people are the biggest geniuses ever but are also total idiots. All the women are incredibly "man writing women."

Most annoyingly, the robot does not seem to be sentient, does not communicate, does not have a personality, and only walks for like 30 seconds once.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

I feel stupider for having read this book.

It's a trilogy but even people who liked the first book say the returns steadily diminish.

I normally don't think it's cool to criticize people's appearances, but in this case, this dude chose to go with this supremely tryhard author photo.