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57 lines
2.6 KiB
57 lines
2.6 KiB
4 years ago
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title = "Undercity - Catherine Asaro"
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date = 2021-03-19
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "reviews", "catherine asaro", "scifi"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21412186-undercity):
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Major Bhaajan, a former military officer with Imperial Space Command, is now a
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hard-bitten P.I. with a load of baggage to deal with, and clients with woes
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sometimes personal, sometimes galaxy-shattering, and sometimes both. Bhaajan
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must sift through the shadows of dark and dangerous Undercity—the enormous
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capital of a vast star empire—to find answers.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=3) }}
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There are some cool elements in this book, but I felt like it tried to stretch
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too long and lost its pacing after the middle.
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For example, a city built by humans teleported billions on kilometres across the
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space, getting in another planet, having to learn the technology present to
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survive. That's cool.
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On the other hand, the fact that the current story is 5.000 years after that
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make things a bit hard to swallow. I mean, look how much we changed in 100 years
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here, imagine how much things would change in 50 times that. But it feels like
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the current state is pretty much the same as 5.000 years before, so it feels the
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whole thing was managed by incompetents (we learn magical technology and then
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nothing).
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Another interesting factor: The whole vision of a world controlled by women. It
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really twists the current state of a male society around, when men being
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"pretty" and women being the strong ones. The start of the book this is a bit
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too much -- I mean, men are really shown as being just pretty pieces of meat,
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and I'm not saying this 'cause I'm a man and I can clearly see that society
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today treats women like that, but heck, let's kill it. 5.000 years, remember?
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5.000 years and we still treat people like pretty things to shown around?
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Fortunately, later this distinction mellows a bit, with the "pretty men" getting
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out of the story.
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Unfortunately, by the end of the book, things get so confusing to follow around
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that I really didn't care anymore. Dialogues are well constructed, but
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descriptions of sewers and such got way over me. The destruction of said sewers?
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It was so confusing to me that I couldn't follow the story anymore -- and I
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simply let it flow and waited for the dialogues.
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Speaking of dialogues, the whole bunch is told in first person and there seems to
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be a lot of "internal talking" just to expose things. Some are nice and really
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contribute to the story, some are lengthy and add mostly nothing, and some
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are... shallow.
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Since this is a first book, I can understand that the following books may be
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more involving (to me, at least).
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