And well, The Thief....is not great. The story is centered around Eren Savitas, who is essentially an interstellar spy for a multi species alliance, and who stows aboard an alien spaceship to catch a thief, only to find himself trying to stop a mysterious weapon from destroying that whole previously unknown alien species. The story's setting relies upon some premises that defy belief and more importantly, rely upon Eren essentially being the perfect spy/agent who can almost never do wrong, with the exception of some moments during a really badly done and cliche romance subplot with Eren's superior. There are some attempts at dealing with the now classic theme of stopping the cycles of revenge and violence here that aren't bad, but mostly this book struggles to maintain any source of tension that anything will go wrong for our hero or to make his actions to save the day actually intriguing. The result is a novel that features very readable prose but a plot I just rolled my eyes repeatedly at.
More after the jump:
Plot Summary:
Eren Savitas is an anaden agent of the Concord, the alliance of species such as the humans, anaden, and asterions, and his job is to look into hints of foreign interference with Concord space. So when he spots a person trying to look like an Anaden quietly leaving from the direction of a Concord research institute, he quietly tails that person...even to the point of stowing aboard the shapeshifting thief's spaceship. But what Eren doesn't expect is for the person he's following to be a new type of alien - a Hesgyr - and for him to find himself way out far beyond Concord space as the Hesgyr thief takes the ship to a city far out in the universe. It soon becomes apparent to Eren that the Hesgyr possess capabilities that would make them extremely difficult enemies....ones who would be almost impossible to keep out.
And so Eren embarks on a different task: revealing himself to the Hesgyr thief, Tolje, and trying to befriend them (while obtaining intel on them on the side of course). But in doing so, Eren soon finds himself wrapped up in the mystery that caused the Hesgyr to steal from the Concord in the first place: an unknown enemy is using a seemingly unstoppable tech to massacre Hesgyr outposts, with no hint of why or where they are coming from. Eren, Tolje, and Eren's superior Nyx soon find themselves desperately searching for both answers as to who is attacking the Hesgyr and how to stop their incredible weapon....as the attacks are getting closer and closer to the Hesgyr main city of Nythir, where billions of sentients' lives hang in the balance.
Let's be upfront here: The Thief features a setting with certain premises that may break your suspension of disbelief based upon how ridiculous/improbable they are. I don't even mean just that the aliens all eat and drink (or have sex apparently) the same way, but in certain ideas that background Eren's decision making: First, that Eren's species, the anaden, don't die when their bodies do but their minds instantly awaken in a new body back on their home planet (or somewhere)....no matter HOW far away that home planet may be. Second, that Eren has internal communications that keep him in instantaneous contact with people anywhere in the galaxy...again, no matter how far. And finally, that wormholes essentially function as just magic portals, such that a character has a personal wormhole device that allows her to just go back and forth throughout the galaxy as long as she knows where a person or place is. It's possible some of this is explained or justified earlier in this universe, but as part of this stand alone, it kinda beggars belief (especially given the story does mention special relativity in an aside earlier, so we are supposedly dealing with ordinary physics) and the instantaneous ability to send signals/minds/beings across space feels just bonkers as an unjustified premise. I don't mean to suggest that something always needs to be Hard SciFi to be good - absolutely not! - but here, where the main character's risk taking is justified by that, well, in threw me and at least one other reader out of the narrative for a while because it is kinda preposterous. (The science behind the antagonists is also kind of ridiculous, but at least it's normal scifi ridiculousness).
If those premises don't bother you too much, well maybe the story might work for you. With some occasional exceptions (the opening sentence is a mouthful), Jennsen writes in very readable prose that makes it easy to read large quantities of this story quickly. There are themes here dealing with the end results of individuals only thinking for themselves and of dealing with the cycles of vengeance that can occur that are solid, if not exactly profound. And the Hesgyr as a people are interesting and pose a setting that totally could work for future works and worlds. Moreover, the plot does have a nice beginning, middle, and end, and while it does repeatedly reference past characters and events in Jennsen's shared universe, it does not require reading them to figure out what's going on. There's some solid SciFi work here.
Alas, I kind of hated the way Jennsen wrote her main character Eren, who is the very core and center of this book, so that prevents this book from really working for me. Eren is basically a perfect hero and it's kind of ridiculous and grating. He is likable to every character and charms his way into almost everyone's good graces pretty quickly. He wants the best for anyone who isn't doing something evil, even if they're foreign aliens he has no reason to help, and his ideas are always the best ones others haven't somehow thought about. And somehow everyone seems to agree with this almost immediately even to the point of ridiculousness: for example a council of foreign aliens, whose knowledge of Eren's race being that they were relatively recently conquering warmongers, giving Eren access to confidential information in like 5 seconds despite him having stowed away on a ship to get there and having no way to back up his claims that he can actually help them or would actually want to do so. With the exception of the romance subplot - more on that in a bit - Eren can basically do no wrong whatsoever, and it is so beyond belief.
Now listen, uber-competent heroes are a thing in genre and elsewhere and can work with special writing: generally that requires some really witty or enjoyable dialogue or those heroes thinking of and executing brilliant plans and actions that make you smile or laugh or whatever. None of that is here: Eren's ideas are ridiculously obvious (gee someone is attacking you, maybe check who you might've stolen from who might now be desperately seeking vengeance?) nor are his actions innovative or anything other than cliche. I kind of liked some of the side characters here - Tolje for example is a really enjoyable character as he deals with family drama, the struggles of dealing with Eren, and his job as an alien thief/scavenger - but this book is so Eren's book that his perfection just made me constantly roll my eyes.
Not helping is a romance subplot that I swear to gods is so incredibly cliched and outdated. Again, as I've said before, tropes are not a bad thing and they are classically used in romance. That said, what we have here feels like it came from romance in the scifi 80s, with Eren dealing with his long lost wife and his sexual attraction to his superior Nyx, a girl who doesn't seem to have emotions and feelings as compared to the empathetic Eren. The guy teaching the emotionless girl how to feel is SOOOOO corny and outdated and it isn't helped by dumb romance tropes like "oh he wakes up after sex and feels guilty and acts rude to push her away!" And the attraction on Eren's side is seemingly only skin deep: it's purely physical and has nothing to do with her otherwise, which doesn't help matters...especially as the romance subplot is a non-factor for the first 2/3 of the books but becomes a major part of the final 1/3 so it just feels sometimes added on for no reason.
In short, Jennsen knows how to write readable prose and to create a fun alien species, but so much of this story relies upon an uberperfect and boring main hero, a bad romance subplot, and setting ideas that were a struggle to get past. I can't recommend this book go any further in the SPSFC.
No comments:
Post a Comment