2 out of 4 stars
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ANTimatter by David Winship is a humorous, quirky sci-fi book. It tells the adventures of Neil, a young man who is taken to the planet Melinda to act as a peace negotiator. This is the third book in The Voyager Series, so there is a fair bit of backstory to catch up on. Neil’s late grandmother married an alien from Melinda and went on to became its leader. The conflict between Melinda and Earth was caused by invasion attempts by ant-like creatures called chillocks, and a misunderstanding over a heart transplant. On Melinda there is a small human population descended from abductees who were taken to keep Neil’s grandmother company. These people want to be returned to Earth and have staged an uprising in order to get their way. Neil finds himself negotiating on their behalf.
I love humour, I love quirky, and I love sci-fi. So this book has all the ingredients to be a top favourite for me. However, as I tucked a napkin into my collar, pulled the bowl towards me and prepared to fill my boots, I found that I had been served the ingredients but not the meal itself. I can’t put my finger on why it didn’t work for me. Perhaps some of the humour was lost in the delivery, yet the author biography on the Amazon page is hilarious.
It may be that I found the characters to be rather one-dimensional. I had no idea what Aysha looked like, except that she was wearing jeans. I also didn’t get much of a visual impression of John or Ollie, and I initially kept confusing yukawa3 with casimir2. The only characters that I had a firm handle on were Neil himself, polkingbeal67 because he carried an umbrella, and ‘the woman with the skull tattoo on her cheek’ for obvious reasons.
A great deal of the story is delivered as a stream of consciousness or as dialogue and banter. Most of this was entertaining but not laugh-out-loud funny. At one point, Neil gave a description of global capitalism to Ollie which was quite in-depth and technical. This didn’t seem quite right coming from a character who had proved earlier that he couldn’t tell the difference between a constellation and a galaxy.
I was impressed to find that this is one of the best-edited books I’ve reviewed for some time. I only spotted two errors and they were technicalities, American spellings in a British book.
Despite being book 3, ANTimatter stands alone and the recaps are spread out within the story which helps with the flow. Although I didn’t dislike the book, it’s not one that I’m going to be recommending to my friends, so I can’t rate it a 3. I am rating it 2 out of 4 stars (fair). I would have liked to give it 2.5 for being so well edited.
Although it didn’t hit he spot for me, I’m sure that there are other people out there who like quirky, humorous sci-fi and who would appreciate this book.
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ANTimatter
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