Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsVery Good Debut, a Few Inconsistencies
Reviewed in the United States šŗšø on September 10, 2014
Overall, I really liked this book. The author clearly has a mind for the techincal (I like so called "hard" sci-fi, the kind with lots of techno-jargon and fancy tech), as well as being well-read and an expansive vocabulary while keeping things at a easy-to-read, relatable, and well-edited level. However, this book suffers a bit, and has an overall "confused themes" kind of air to it.
The premise is pretty simple: for decades, the American government has known of a mysterious alien ship residing in the Asteroid Belt, but an impending collision with an asteroid compells them to send a single spacecraft with six crew members to investigate and possibly recover the alien ship. Intriguing ... and had this concept been explored more along the lines of "mysterious empty alien monolith" or "creepy derelict that may or may not be openly hostile", the book would have fit perfectly with my expectations and been a perfect read. I went in thinking it was going to be a space-based sort of take on Michael Crichton's "Sphere" (a phenomenal book for those loving twisty-turning psychological thrillers based around scary alien technology). "Fluency", however, turns out to be considerably different from that, but not necessarily in a bad way ... but not really in a great way either.
The biggest complaint I have is a lack of consistency in terms of the overall theme or plot progression. It's a debut book, so I can't be too harsh on the author, since overall this was a surprisingly good read. However, I feel that she was a bit confused on what exactly she wanted this book to be about. The plot starts out, as I said, like it's going to primarily be an "explore the empty derelict space ship" book. But even though it's said it took 10 months for the crew of six human explorers to reach the alien ship, almost no background story is provided leading up to their arrival at the ship. We get the one or two obligatory flashbacks to the protagonist's recruitment, and a few random paragraphs about life on the Providence (the NASA spacecraft), but that's about it. Once aboard the "derelict" ship, things quickly change, and the theme of the book changes ... not dramatically, but significantly. And later, about 2/3rds in, the theme kind of changes again, this time in a way that I found a little odd, a little extreme, and a little discordant and cliche. This book is supposed to be the first in a series, so I feel like best course would have been to leave out this third thematic change until the second book.
Another not insignifcant issue is character development. First and foremost, the portrayal of the protagonist seems rather confused. We're told she's strong, and made it out of a near-certain-death situation in the deep Amazon, and that she passed a rigorous series of psyche tests with NASA, yet it seems like everytime something happens onboard the alien ship, we find her "fighting back tears" or "blinking back moisture" or having a minor mental break. Keep in mind, these six people were chosen, among possibly hundreds of candidates, thousands even, to go explore the first alien ship known to mankind. Ordinarily, I would say this is a typical mysoginistic portrayal of women being emotional ... but the author is also a woman ... so that's odd. In addition, the title of the book, and the immediate casting of the protagonist make it seem like there will be a lot of alien language decoding and mystery solving, but a rather convenient plot device occurs right at the start of things to make her original role practically irrelevant. In general, despite there being 6 characters, there's only one other character with any kind of development (but no real progression or change), and one of the remaining 4 is mostly a cardboard cut-out, used primarily as a plot device in one particular scene, then largely forgotten and passed over. The other 3 are largely just copy-paste cliches.
Don't get me wrong; my criticisms here are made with the intent to inform and change, rather than poke and tear apart. Overall, I liked the book. The vernacular used, the narration, MOST of the plot points, the drama, the techno-jargon used, the ideas and concepts are all captivating and interesting. There are a handful of minor plotholes, and a dozen or so things that never get explained fully, for the more curious minded readers (for example, an alien computer system knows Latin ... but no modern language. Why? How? Why no new languages if the ship's been sitting there for decades, maybe centuries?), but overall, it's a quick, but not unstimulating read And many of the questions I did have actually got answered by the author in a surprisingly logical and scientific way. Most of the shortcomings here are the kind that can be passed off as the normal glitches of a debut novel, or things that can be improved with future installments, and so for that reason, I give this book 4 stars, where elsewhere I may have given it 3. And ultimately, if a book leaves you feeling entertained, then the act of weaving a fictional narrative served its purpose.
I recommend the book, and look forward to the next installment in this series.
