Good premise bad execution

A great start. The Sun disappears. WOW!

Unfortunately I was quickly irritated by bloated, boring and plain irrelevant interactions between the characters in the book and the drivel they constantly harped on about.

Add a ton of - again irrelevant - blundering around a political landscape which offers no real value to the plot development, an unrealistic solution to the threat and one of the worst endings I have ever read in a Sci Fi book meant this was a real miss for me. It felt like the author realised he had run out of words (or the will to live writing the book) and threw in a bodged ending to get rid of the book.

Sadly I didn't like the narration also. It felt as if the narrator was reading a book to a 12 year old. I've read a lot of Baxter from years ago and I do rate his earlier work highly but this is not up to scratch.

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1 person found this helpful

Big ideas drowned by small characters and baffling narration.

As usual with Baxter's work there are huge, mind blowing ideas here. And also as usual with Baxter they're hidden behind weirdly stilted unrealistic dialogue serving as exposition.
Usually that's bearable, however the narrator has made the baffling choice of not putting any character into the characters. It's read in a steady tone without accent, inflection or changes in pitch, so every voice is exactly the same. It therefore becomes impossible to follow who is speaking. This is compounded by one of the (male) character's names being pronounced "she"
Fine if you're looking at words on the page, maddeningly confusing if you're not and the narrator refuses to differentiate etween characters.
All in all its a fairly ordinarily book made less good by poor choices from the narrator.

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2 people found this helpful

fantastic story

really abrupt end, I think the main reason I was annoyed by the abrupt end was I was enjoying the story. the final act I think had enough legs to be a sequel

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not the book for me

Trying to into the story. it's not grabbing. the intonation of the reader. the many names. Liked the intro and the concept. But I'm halfway now and the book never got rolling. Have read several Stephen Baxter books and loved them and came out with new ideas. This just makes me want to reread three body problem....

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Reasonable book

it's an interesting story concept and it plays out ok. The narrator on this audio book struggles with sounding different for different characters and it can be confusing sometimes which character is speaking

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an implausible tale

the premise of the story looked potentially entertaining but I did not enjoy the plot or the characterisation

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