Wednesday, July 17, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport




Medusa Uploaded is the first in a SF series (trilogy?) by Emily Devenport.  I'd seen the book recommended on twitter a while back, but none of my libraries had the book, so I put it on the backburner....and then it popped up as a Hoopla audiobook.  So, months later, I took it out, to see how it would turn out. 

The result is uhhhhhh, bonkers.  The story jumps back and forth chronologically, with little rhyme or reason to such time-jumps, there are deus ex machinas throughout, and some character interactions are so over the top it's almost laughable.  And yet....I enjoyed Medusa Uploaded - it's certainly a mess that feels like the author had a billion ideas, refused to cut any, and tried to make it all work out, but it's a mess that never stops being fun and always has the reader guessing as to what will happen next.  It sure isn't boring, and a sequel is coming out this month (July).

Trigger Warning: The book features one sequence in which a noble family has a tradition of gang rapes, which is then discovered by our heroine via surveillance footage.  Nothing is shown or described, nor is the behavior glorified in any way, so it works and is believable, but if that's a problem for you, fair warning.


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Oichi Angelis was supposed to be just a worm, one of the lowliest classes of people on the Generation Ship Olympia, working as a mere servant.  Oichi came from Titania, the former sister-ship of Olympia, before Titania was destroyed, together with Oichi's parents and thousands of others.  But when Oichi was a child, her father - a scientist - implanted within her an Implant giving her access to ancient music from human history....as well as greater abilities to interface with comms and databases throughout the generation ships.  It was her father's hope to spread these implants throughout the people, possibly to lead to a change in the social structure of the society they lived in - where rich executives controlled everything - including the lives of those beneath them.

But when Oichi finds herself on the wrong end of an Executive's murder spree and is thrown out an airlock, she discovers another benefit of the Implant and her father's work: an artificial being known as Medusa, who saves her life and links with her, providing her with powers she could never have dreamed of.  With Medusa at her side, and thousands of sleeping other Medusa Units at her disposal, Oichi begins to plot a revolution to take control of Olympia from the oppressive Executives.  But in the process, Oichi will discover that not everything on the ship is as it seems, and that there are other players in this game of control with agendas far more dangerous than she could possibly imagine, and who might be too dangerous for even Medusa to handle.....
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If you're a regular reader of this blog - and I think there's like maybe 5 of you - you might recognize a pattern with my reviews:  I post the positives first, then the negatives, then a quick sum-up at the bottom.  I'm going to reverse that here, because to do it that way would sell Medusa Uploaded short - this book is as I put it above the jump: a mess.  The book jumps back and forth in time in sometimes confusing ways (which is even worse when you read this as an audiobook), beginning with a point in time that the book doesn't really get up to till 75% of the way through the book, then jumps around a bit back and forth before finally starting to move forward in a normal chronological order....only to jump forward to basically right before the finale for a glimpse of what's to come....and then back in time back to the place where we left off.  It's often disorienting and serves absolutely no purpose.

The same is often true of characters and ideas other than our main character.  It seems quite often that the book loses track of where certain of these characters are at various times, resulting in some of them not appearing even in parts where they should fit in logically (for example, a mid-level executive ally of the protagonist is completely AWOL in a portion of the book where our protagonist is embedded with the executives that ally should be most familiar with), and antagonists disappearing for large stretches of the book only to reappear with different oft-seeming random agendas much later in the book.  The same is true for some of the ideas and concepts going around here - the book has no less than four different groups of antagonists (and more really if I think about it) with their own conspiracies and agendas going around, and their goals and concepts just kind of get muddled up and combined in ways that don't always make sense.

The only constant throughout is our first person narrator, Oichi, who tells our story throughout.  She's.....not normal.  The book is told from her narration, and as the epilogue reminds us, she's kind of an unreliable narrator as to at the very least her own emotional balance: she repeatedly tells us about how she always thinks before she acts and is a mater planner, but she's instead incredibly impulsive in her actions.  Still, whenever she puts her mind to these incredibly impulsive actions, they generally work, even when you'd think the people she's relying on to react appropriately might have some major questions (this really only happens once, and god it should happen more often).

But here's the thing - Oichi's nuttiness and impulsiveness and lack of patience in waiting for her schemes to bear fruit makes this book so insanely fun and nutty that it was hard to put down.  Each thing Oichi discovers and each way she reacts to those things is so utterly bonkers that I couldn't stop cracking up with amusement, and Oichi's feelings as she describes them are always exaggerated and hilarious.  The dialogue of the book is pretty damn good and fun, and the utter off the wall nature of the heroine and everyone else keeps you guessing throughout.  Is our heroine saved quite often by deus ex machinas?  Yeah sure (She gets thrown out the airlock enough times for it to become a running joke for me on twitter).  But somehow, the book makes it work.

A sequel is coming out shortly (or might be out by the time of this review being posted), and I'll get to it if it also comes out on Hoopla for sure....more of this nuttiness would certainly be appreciated.
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