Monday, April 16, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson




Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a short novel that tries to deal with a lot of ideas - time travel, ecological reconstruction, body chemistry manipulation, body part replacement, ethics of killing people who may not exist, issues of capitalism affecting the attempt to improve the public good, etc etc etc.  There's a lot going on in this book, and I can see how some people and some critics might really enjoy the ideas being explored here.

Alas, I'm not one of those people, as there simply wasn't enough space to put all of these ideas in this book, make a coherent plot, and get me to care about the characters enough to make me really interested in the outcomes.  It's not a bad book per se, but I wound up finishing each chapter, and eventually the book itself, and just thinking to myself "huh, that's it?"

More after the Jump:


--------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
In the future, ecological disasters forced humanity underground, with the population living in so-called "hells."  These disasters caused the birth of "plague babies" who had physical issues that had to be handled by technology .  Things have improved lately, resulting in the births of more healthy babies (referred to derogatorily as "fat babies").  Meanwhile, improvements in the world are largely dependent upon what will be funded by the many many banks, looking for the best returns on their investments.

Minh is a "plague baby" - who has artificial spider-like legs - who specializes in ecological restoration of the above ground Earth.  But when an organization called tern develops consequence-free time travel - allegedly able to bring people back to the past without altering the present (each trip back creates a new pocket universe which collapses when people go back to the present), the Banks stop funding Minh's projects, as people would prefer to go take vacations or live in the healthy world of the Past rather than try to fix the world of the present.

And then a new project proposal comes in - TERN wants to send people back in time to ancient Mesopotamia to do a survey for the use of the land in the present for redevelopment, and Minh decides she wants in - to try and see the truth behind TERN which she hates, and as the best chance for her to do her job at helping the present.  Together with her friend Hamid (another plague baby) and young idealist Kiki, a fat baby, they go back in time with a member of TERN....only to find that the ethics of dealing with the people of the past, to whom they look like monsters, are not quite so clear cut as she might have imagined.
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As you can tell in the above summary, there's a LOT of stuff going on in this short novel.  Unmentioned in my above plot summary is the fact that the book also spends time with - at the beginning of each chapter - the King of the Mesopotamian Empire, viewing events (out of chronological order) from his perspective.  This book explores time travel ethics, ethics of treatment of others who are not as enhanced/unfortunate, character mistreatment, ethics of capitalism....I can go on and on. And well, there just isn't enough time for any of it.   And still somehow this book manages to seem to waste space - for example, we spend a lot of time early on establishing the setting before the characters go time traveling, and it just seems boring.

The result of having all of this stuff in here and not enough pages for it are some characters who aren't particularly interesting, because even when the book is trying to deal with conflicts and development between them, it quickly has to shunt off to other topics.  The end result is that I couldn't latch on to anything here as something to focus on.

Again, there's an interesting novel to be found here, and maybe another hundred pages could've made this whole thing work.  Or maybe the book would've worked better removing some of the ideas (the Plague Baby/Fat Baby issue perhaps could be removed with little issue).  But the end result of this one is a bizarre short novel with no impact whatsoever, despite dealing with a bunch of themes that certainly seem like they'd be interesting to read about and discuss.  I'd skip this one, personally, although maybe it'll work better for other readers - I know this has gotten some positive reviews from places I trust.
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