BW Media Spotlight

Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

I just noticed that there’s a pull quote on the cover from Publisher’s Weekly…I mean, I knew it was there but I didn’t really look at it until today given what it says: “The pace is unrelenting.” Yeah. The definition I looked up gave me two possibles: “not yielding in strength, severity, or determination”, which given that the pace of the story itself has been slowed by worldbuilding and showing off this is The Future amuses me, and “(of a person or their behavior) not giving way to kindness or compassion”, and while I’ve had worse part of me thinks this is what the reviewer had in mind. To be sure I looked to see if they put the review online, which they did for the original hardcover. The one for the paperback is just a truncated version of this one. It’s short and for some reason has an extra “r” but here it is:

Some of Shatner’s projections are likely (newspapers and magazines published by fax), some are improbable (androids so human-like that most people can’t tell the difference) and some are the same old thing (a missing scientist with the standard-issue beautiful daughter).

Well, given many people get their news from a website rather than fax we actually outpaced the future, roboticists are trying to make those kinds of androids (which worries me), and that plot does get used quite a bit. The last time we saw it here the daughter and the scientist were evil and menacing the cyborg version of the Three Stooges. This is the line the pull quote comes from.

While the writing is awkward in spots, the pace is unrelenting.

I’ve found the pace rather slow thus far, though last chapter it at least was starting to find a balance between the worldbuilding and story. Now the story needs to overtake the worldbuilding and just be the parts that matter. Let’s see if it makes waves in that direction this chapter.

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