David Brin “Existence” (2012)
0/10.
Unbelievably, I gave up on a book after 550 of the 650 pages. WFT. It was sort of chundering along, plundering its way thru tech talk raffles and sci-fi paper symposiums shoehorned in and tarted up as fictional prose, nerdy jarringly-inept conversations jammed in there until I belatedly realized, you know what, this is going nowhere, I don’t give a shit about a single character in this stupid doorstop of a book. And neither do you Mr Author. How shit of an author do you need to be to impart that feeling upon Dear Reader, at the 550 page juncture, precisely when all the narratives should be starting to weave together into a thrilling page-turning finale? This shit. Idiotically, after 550 pages I finally read the authors blurb. NASA guy, phD in Science etc. Of course. All makes sense now. That explains the clumsy conversations where all the characters have the same voice amidst the deluge of story-rappeling futurey scifi tech talk. Admittedly, the futurey sci-fi techtalk is really well done, probably prescient with all the Virtual Bollox etc. No fucks given. Maybe I’m just not a sci-fi guy? In summary, Updike, Roth and Vidal didn’t try and build a space shuttle BOOMFAH.
I tend to think of books as delineable into 3 levels
Conscious: Just reading the words. No elaboration, no synapses firing, little impact, soon given up on.
Unconsciousness: Into it, even lost in it for phases.
Pure consciousness: Completely lost in it and unaware of anything else around you, an extrapolation laser, beaming into your brain. 100%. “The Kiss” by Chekhov the only entry into this category for me as of yet.