SF/F Review - Dead Silence
Synopsis: Five blue-collar workers find the space equivalent of the Titanic floating out past Pluto. It’s haunted.
Book Review: This is an extremely competent paint-by-numbers horror. Every individual piece is pretty good. The writing is pretty good. The visuals are pretty good. The characters are pretty good. It is impossible to complain about any technical aspect of this novel.
But it’s incredibly formulaic. There is nothing here that you haven’t seen a thousand times before, unless you only started reading in the past few years. This is the mass-produced pop music of sci-fi horror. It doesn’t do anything except gracefully move you through the same stock story-beats that everyone who lacks any passion or inspiration is willing to write for you.
This would make a pretty good plot for a standard SF Horror video game, since the focus in video games is on the experience of moving through the world and confronting these things yourself. It wouldn’t be a ground-breaking video game or anything, but it would at least be fun. As a novel, it’s just boring.
It would maybe work better if the retreading was of newer things, but the two halves of this novel are basically Alien and Aliens. Those movies are some of the best SF ever put to screen, but you can’t just retell those stories 40 years later with less passion and expect anyone to care.
Not Recommended, obviously.
The Genocidal Instinct: The one really striking thing about this book is the will-to-purify that runs through it. The major theme that keeps being hammered on is that there is a certain type of human that lives among us. These people are utterly disgusting, they defile all that they touch, and they are corrupting our society. Through their vile dealings they’ve subverted what is good and pure in society, and are living as decadent parasites, draining the rest of us and living high atop their stolen wealth/power/prestige. Society must be purified of their rot. Only when we are cleansed of their existence can the rest of us flourish. They deserve to die in horrible ways, and anything visited upon them is self-justified.
I don’t think there is a single chapter in this book which doesn’t push at least some aspect of that message. In a lot of chapters the disgust is just plainly spoken aloud. The author appears to be on board with this message, and expects that the audience will approve and find the book better for its inclusion.
There’s a good way to do this sort of thing. We’ve all read The Wind-up Girl or Altered Carbon or something similar. Molochian pressures force people into terrible choices. Those who do the brutal things needed to survive are properly hated by those who suffer because of those choices. We seethe at the injustice, we want to see the tyrants punished for the horrors they’ve inflicted.
Barnes doesn’t do that. Presumably she could do that, the formula to do it is easy to follow, and Barnes knows how to execute on a formula. Apparently, though, she didn’t see any need to do this. She can simply point at a group that her audience already knows deserve hatred, and pile on a lot of “these people are utterly disgusting, we should have a cleansing” and get applause for it. Everyone involved thinks of themselves as good people, who are doing a good thing! Our species’ history makes a lot more sense when you find yourself actually living in such a moment and seeing how it happens. It is very clear now. :(
Fun personal note, one of the ways you can tell which humans are the disgusting kind is that they squander resources making their light-sources look like incandescent bulbs for purely aesthetic reasons. MFer, I have LED light-sources that look like incandescent bulbs, do I deserve extermination??
Book Club Review: No one was very impressed with the novel. Those who hadn’t read much SF horror were less bored than those of us who’ve read a bunch, and so didn’t mind the formulaicness as much. But the lack of anything of substance here left us without much to say, regardless of how much we liked/disliked it. Not Recommended.