(June 2012)
I’m obviously a huge fan of Terry
Pratchett. While I’ve only read Stephen Baxter’s Destiny’s Children series, that
at least displayed a pleasingly ambitious sense of scale. So I was really
looking forward to this.
It’s a surprisingly gentle ride, truth be
told. I believe it’s the first in a projected series, which bodes well. I
enjoyed it well enough, but it actually feels a touch lightweight for a
standalone novel. It’d definitely be more satisfying as the opening of a series
- always depending on how that series progresses, I suppose. There are a lot of
interesting ideas about evolution and speciation (courtesy of Baxter, clearly),
and a fair number of humanely funny jokes (Pratchett), but there’s really not
much in the way of conflict or peril right up until the end, and even then it
doesn’t feel all that urgent.
Terry Pratchett’s co-written another novel
before, also with another writer I like a lot. I was a lot younger when I read
that, but I don’t remember being able to pick who wrote what as clearly as this
time around. But I’d also hope I’m a more sophisticated reader now, so there’s
that.
Even so, I finished it in a couple of days
and I don’t do that with books I don’t like. More please.
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