Julio Biason
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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{{ 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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