B.'s Reviews > The World Gives Way

** spoiler alert ** I rarely leave reviews for books. It usually takes a book actively angering me to do it, and actively angering me usually takes a book squandering its potential. That's what this book has done: unnecessarily squandered its potential.

On the face of it, a book about a generation ship dying, with a main character who is a runway indentured servant, smuggling a baby who isn't hers, being chased by a policeman deciding what his role is during Armageddon - well, that sounds fantastic, a possible contender for my top ten list of the year.

But everything about this book - just like everything about the generation ship - quickly falls apart.

For starters, this book tries to be hard science fiction when that is clearly beyond the capabilities of the author. I like a SciFi story that's soft SciFi. I don't need the science to be "good" to enjoy it, and I'm not a scientist, so authors can sneak a lot by me so long as the basics that I know are adhered to. But if you are going to write hard SciFi, it has got to make sense to a person who knows enough about science and engineering to be dangerous as a reader.

The author - unnecessarily for the story - tries to shoehorn in a lot of "science," presumably to world-build. For most of the book, we're given descriptors of the ship - its surface is roughly the size of Switzerland, its biomes are made to resemble earth, mountains were carved by artists to include cool rock-face buildings, desert sand is made from crushed recycled glass from earth trash dumps - that could stand alone without a whole lot of real science explaination from the author.

[In fact, that bit about the sand is particularly interesting - the different colors of glass, once mixed, now have become heterogenous because they have different weights that have separated through the rocking of the ship.]

For most of the story, it is unclear what shape exactly the ship is or how it gets its gravity. After a particularly bad quake brought on by the cracking hull of the ship, the ship loses gravity momentarily. So I assumed it was artificial gravity. Cool. I can deal with that. But, later in the book, spin is mentioned as the source of gravity. Before I get into the ship's bizarre shape, I need to state the obvious: if a ship was hit or damaged sufficiently to stop the spin and thereby kill the gravity, gravity won't just come back a minute later on its own, with everything being just like normal. That's not how gravity works in a hard science environment.

It took until the last 15-20% of the book to understand what the ship is supposed to look like, and "knowing" now what it looks like doesn't really help me picture it, because - whoa man - is this ship design *bizarre.* In fact, it is an engineer's nightmare.

This spinning ship - something that everyone (I hate generalizations, but in this case I think it is fair) would default to being a ring that spins fast, with people living on the inside edge so as to take advantage of centripetal force - is in fact a cylinder. But not the way you might picture it with the people living on the curved surface. Not at all...

Before we got the skinny on the "cylinder" shape, we got lots of mentions of the "edge" of the ship, and of the "circumference" of the ship. People are living in a circle of space - the edge of the cylinder. The sky is another flat circle above your head. The walls are flat sides going straight up. So, the only usable space on the whole ship is a giant circle the size of Switzerland, leaving an equal circle empty (more on this later), and the massive walls holding the circles together also empty. I cannot image scientists or designers or financiers thinking up this arrangement, and all of its *massive* wasted space and resources, and think that's the way to go.

I get that writers want to make something new and unique to their canon, but this author should not be (literally) trying to invent the wheel here with their obvious lack of real scientific and engineering understanding.

Not only is all of that space wasted, but having what would basically amount to a giant flipping coin in space would need a massive amount of fuel to keep itself spinning in anything resembling a stable enough way to keep a regular gravity and a regular trajectory, especially assuming at the micro meteor hits it is sure to take.

The problem that the ship is facing is a cracked outer hull that is evidently unfixable by the engineers is the ship. The ship is slowly breaking apart. I think I know why that is happening, and it all has to do with the ship's original design.

The inner hull is made to look like sky for the majority of the inhabitants so that, generations in, people don't forget what the sky is and decide to stick to the ship. So far so good. But, the outer hull has windows. In order to give the engineers hope and something to look at? The outer hull has hundreds of stress points and seals that only a few people will ever know of, let alone see, with no justification for their existence.

Worse? The "sky" of the inner hull isn't a display. No. It is a series of *holes* punched into the inner hull, through which individual lights are shown to approximate stars. They are manually lit and moved by people. Also, the sun is evidently moved that way, too?

So the outer hull has literally millions of seams and *plexiglass* windows, and the inner hull has "irregular" and "jagged" holes punched into it for lights that could just be mounted on the underside. No wonder the ship is in trouble!

When they attempt to repair the ship, they "vacuum seal" the area around the hull. All the space around them is literally vacuum, not that they can expose it to vacuum to take the stress off, because the internal hull is full of holes! Why is this imagined/written this way? This ship would never exist this way.

Did you catch the manually moved sun thing? Well, when it is finally announced that the world is ending, all of a sudden the sun starts misbehaving. Originally I hypothesized that the micrometeors were computer programmers who created a virus so that the simulation of the day and night cycle only took an hour. (Just as logical as any "science" or plot points in this book.) In fact, the workers who moved the sun just gave up, and set it to "manual," but the manual mode wasn't working? It was just for the drama, but still, what a crazy, lazy answer.

More effects from the sun? All the weird cycles of the sun changed the weather patterns, because of "all the extra heat from the sun." Except - there's no reason why the ship would be getting heat from the sun lights. Those bulbs would have to have such resistance to create heat that they'd constantly be burning out. No. Those lights would be cold LCDs. They'd never effect the weather.

Next, let's talk about the people running the sky and doing the technical maintenance on the ship. It all started with trained engineers. Then they didn't want to do it anymore. So they took troublesome runaway slaves/indentured servants, and the mentally and/or criminally insane, and made them take care of the ship. Sounds reasonable?

Those people were kept in the outer hull, which was separated by a wall of deserts. Deserts that apparently took 2-3 days of driving to reach from the city. In an area the size of Switzerland, nowhere would be a 2 day drive away, let alone the "strip" of desert in place to keep people away from the illusion of the wall (for whatever reason).

Also: the prison doors had no locks so anyone can wander in or out at will, apparently. To the area that is not only a high security prison and asylum, but also where all the infrastructure in the entire ship is controlled. Seems right.

And to get from the "ground" to the sky? It is nice that it was acknowledged that the gravity would flip, but, the ladders people inexplicably have to use to get from the "up" elevator to the "down" elevator are zero G, even though they are along the side walls, which - and I could be wrong here - but would in all likelihood has gravity pushing outward, at depending if they were on the outer edge or the side one, potentially at a much faster or slower turn, so gravity might be way stronger.

All this adds up to: don't write a detailed, preportedly hard SciFi book when science isn't your strong suit.

But wait, there's more: my complaints aren't all about the bad science. There's also the bad character development.

Our first POV is an indentured servant (her original ancestors signed up themselves and all their heirs to be in perpetual bondage until the ship lands, and then those heirs will be free). Her mom disappeared. She's passed around as a slave. Her only moments of love are her using people. That's fine. But why is she taking care of this child?

The child is the daughter of the richest people on the ship. She's the nanny. I'd accept that she loves the kid. But she spends most of the book planning to abandon the kid. Then decides she doesn't want to. Instead, she wants to use the "special privileges" of the girl to potentially get her to an escape pod. She apparently neither has explicit love for the child, nor qualms about the baby having special privileges she could never dream of.

I could deal with these obtuse motivations if the story were in 1st person, as a lot of people are shockingly obtuse and unaware of their own motivations, but this is in third person, so part of the joy of reading this should be the narrator weaving out the implications of a person's place in the world, aspirations, qualms, and inner battles, etc... the author gives us none of this.

Worse, this book ends up being a "cops are good and mean well always" message from our other POV. He's such a Pollyanna, he has no idea some cops are corrupt or act poorly, or that power can do things like put unwanted people in gulags (i.e. the apparently maintenance staff).

He doesn't so much wrestle with his job in the end times, but marvles that life could be complicated. His only interesting characteristics are his struggling with his parents being criminals. He also comes from a formerly rich family, but that is apparently not important or interesting or sad to him.

And really, these struggles, that could have interesting sociological implications, are not only glossed over, but given to a Pollyanna cop.

And why a cop? All of his police actions are slow and completely nonsensical (all criminals go this court because they do, so let's go to this city and sit by a pool all day waiting for them to trip over our beach towels) and drag the pace of the book to a near standstill. It is boring. If you choose to glorify cops, at least make it exciting. If it isn't exciting, use literally anybody else, please. I'm so tired of excusing or glorifying cops in books. It's problematic.

But what bothered me most was probably the lazy writing on the part of the author.

-At least once per chapter the author used a version of the formula "it could have been a minute or an hour or a century for all I knew."

-The female POV was so "broken" that she "never kissed anyone for fun or love, only to use them" when there was a whole scene of her doing just that with a minor character. And once, when the cop asked her if he could do anything for her she broke down crying because apparently no one ever asked her that question in her whole life? The dude she was using did that at least once in the book. Ridiculously sloppy writing.

-The female POV was completely uneducated but owns books, but the college educated cop had never held a real book in his life?

-The female POV has no education or connections or inside info, but knows exactly where to head to get to the prison - out in the middle of the desert - and finds the exact spot unwittingly. She knows what cities will have no security cameras to track her when she's on the run. She knows exactly which accounts is her masters will have no tracking software when she uses his money.

-The male POV sees a car driving kilometers away during citywide panic, and somehow knows the woman and baby are in it, of all people, all fleeing from the end is the world.

-The female POV's mom was in the exact place they end up. She was dead, but one of the 12 people they talked to knew her intimately.

Basically, every plot point was stumbled on like our POVs were homing pigeons.

And just structurally, the whole book shifted from one character POV alternating, to a shared POV at the end, which was just terrible, confusing, and got rid of any doubt/intrigue between the two.

The book was readable for the first half, maybe, until the author started adding terrible science to justify the world-building, started messing with the POV format, leaned into the Deus ex machina so hard on every plot point, and got sloppy in every bit of dialogue in their mad rush to get this trash heap to the end in a clear "I just want to be done already" rush.

Thanks for letting me get all that madness out of my system.

If you're looking for a book to show you what not to do in writing, give it a read, but otherwise, allow my review to give you the best of the bad points, and spend your reading hours more wisely.

It's too bad. This book sounded like it had so much potential.

*Audiobook