Helpful Score: 4
I suppose this book would be an okay read for when you want to turn your brain completely off, but if you're looking for intelligent science fiction, forget it. The first couple chapters of this book were promising, but it went rapidly downhill after that. Clumsy writing, one-dimensional characters, cheap pseudo-Navajo mystic babble, obvious and clumsy romance, and tacky secret societies that somehow find it simpler to assassinate multiple government officials than to fire a lackey. If anyone in real life acted like any of the characters, they'd be laughed out of the room.
The scenarios presented were equally appallingly unbelievable (****spoiler alert****) - it's Earth's first contact with alien technology, and they've only bothered to send out a couple of grad student archeologists, and despite it being public knowledge, the press isn't bothering to cover it. Our hero gets kidnapped by advanced alien war-robots, and teaches them the stunningly advanced idea that unpredictability is an advantage in attacks (because no A.I. has ever used a random number generator before). The international secret society that controls all the money and power in the world is colluding to help a Russian coup so that Russia will become a superpower again (why?), and to do this it needs to get nanotechnology working (how does this connect?), and to get nanotechnology working, they need to get our hero to Mars (huh?). Blithering nonsense.
The scenarios presented were equally appallingly unbelievable (****spoiler alert****) - it's Earth's first contact with alien technology, and they've only bothered to send out a couple of grad student archeologists, and despite it being public knowledge, the press isn't bothering to cover it. Our hero gets kidnapped by advanced alien war-robots, and teaches them the stunningly advanced idea that unpredictability is an advantage in attacks (because no A.I. has ever used a random number generator before). The international secret society that controls all the money and power in the world is colluding to help a Russian coup so that Russia will become a superpower again (why?), and to do this it needs to get nanotechnology working (how does this connect?), and to get nanotechnology working, they need to get our hero to Mars (huh?). Blithering nonsense.
