Rating: 3/5
Review:
Well written but badly flawed
I enjoyed quite a lot of The Return Of The Incredible Exploding Man,
but I had some pretty severe reservations about it.
The first thing to
say is that Dave Hutchinson writes very well. I’m not normally
much of a sci-fi fan, but he developed such a good sense of slow
menace and a lot of very good, complex characters that I was very
drawn in to the quite slow-paced first two-thirds of the book in
which the protagonist, a struggling science writer, is brought in to
write about a huge, privately funded supercollider. There are some
quite shrewd, well balanced observations about the way in which the
super-rich behave toward the rest of us and Hutchinson creates a
group of people with whom I became quite involved.
The trouble is,
there is a massive event about two-thirds of the way through which
changes everything, including the tone and pace of the book, and all
those people are quite quickly left behind as the story moves on at a
time-skimming pace. It’s reasonably interesting from a sci-fi
point of view, but not very well developed and ultimately a
disappointment.
Hutchinson seems to
be setting us up for a series (or a sequel at least). Despite my
enjoyment of the first section, I don’t think I’ll be bothering
with any more because I thought the later parts were much weaker.
Others may fell differently, but overall I can’t really recommend
this.
(My thanks to
Solaris for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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