Book review: Undercity

content/reviews/books/undercity.md

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