Select language, opens an overlay

Comment

Dec 12, 2017Beatricksy rated this title 1.5 out of 5 stars
I was excited for this: drug pirates stealing formulas, duplicating them, and passing them out to the masses for enrichment. It sounded like the start of a really cool cyberpunky novel...but it went nowhere. It didn't properly explore its landscape, which is the bread and butter of SciFi. We didn't talk about how we'd reached this point, or what it meant for society in general. It was just a fact of life. The characters are flat, based purely upon their relationships. They don't seem to have any real personalities of their own beyond their sexual relations to each other. And the whole robot/human relationship was incredibly uncomfortable, with the way the agent mistreated Paladin. Mistreatment. A distinct lack of understanding for how robotics work despite it being basically his job, Paladin's distressing childlike innocence, the unnecessary pronoun swapping purely to make Elias happy since it's made abundantly clear that pronouns mean literally nothing to Paladin... It's not a story of LGBT empowerment as it seems to want to make you believe; it's weird and uncomfortable. It had some good ideas, and the discussion of robotic enslavement is fascinating, but there's so little to like in a book this long and meandering.