Hollow World by Michael J. Sullivan
Oct. 28th, 2015 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroEllis had reached what seemed to be the end of his life: His son was dead, his marriage was over, and he’d just been diagnosed with lung cancer. So he stepped into the time machine he’d built in his garage for a one-way trip into the future. And humanity was living very differently in the Hollow World.
I’m 90% certain I got this in the “Made With Kickstarter” Humble Bundle, but I’ve honestly lost track at this point.
Anyone who’s read any of my reviews of rpg books (or ever gamed with me) knows I love worldbuilding. This is a world-building sci-fi novel with a big pile of the author’s politics layered on and fetishes layered in. (…as they pretty much all are.) It is totally queer-friendly, if you were concerned about that. It’s not totally sure where to stand on religion, so it avoids being definitive and just has a bunch of conflicting viewpoints.
It’s startlingly “clean” for the genre, in that there’s no sex (and relatively little mention of it) and the author went out of his way to include a no-profanity version of the story (not that there’s much to begin with) in the same pdf. I wonder if heartland Christians make up a vocal majority of his usual readership. I can’t help but believe that a different author, when giving reasons for us to dislike the primary antagonist, would have him note that while the cloned people don’t have genitals, they still have mouths and anuses. (I find it fairly hard to believe that the sort of person he’s presented as being, given a decade without female companionship, wouldn’t do what he felt “necessary.”)
It occurs to me to wonder: In 2050, will we look back on turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi and its obsession with environmental disasters the same way that we look back on 1950s World War 3 spec-fic now? I’ll admit, I have to hope so; that a solution nobody was predicting then (the economic collapse of the USSR) will materialize for climate change in my own lifetime.
The story leaves a bunch of loose ends (two major antagonists escape with some problematic knowledge and technology; there’s no reason additional time travelers won’t eventually show up; the Hive Project is clearly feasible; at least some terraforming of other worlds has been approached) but I suspect a sequel would be less interesting to me because all of the expositive worldbuilding has been done.
Overall: It’s moderately formulaic man-out-of-time spec-fic, and it’s a fast read if you like that sort of thing.
I’m 90% certain I got this in the “Made With Kickstarter” Humble Bundle, but I’ve honestly lost track at this point.
Anyone who’s read any of my reviews of rpg books (or ever gamed with me) knows I love worldbuilding. This is a world-building sci-fi novel with a big pile of the author’s politics layered on and fetishes layered in. (…as they pretty much all are.) It is totally queer-friendly, if you were concerned about that. It’s not totally sure where to stand on religion, so it avoids being definitive and just has a bunch of conflicting viewpoints.
It’s startlingly “clean” for the genre, in that there’s no sex (and relatively little mention of it) and the author went out of his way to include a no-profanity version of the story (not that there’s much to begin with) in the same pdf. I wonder if heartland Christians make up a vocal majority of his usual readership. I can’t help but believe that a different author, when giving reasons for us to dislike the primary antagonist, would have him note that while the cloned people don’t have genitals, they still have mouths and anuses. (I find it fairly hard to believe that the sort of person he’s presented as being, given a decade without female companionship, wouldn’t do what he felt “necessary.”)
It occurs to me to wonder: In 2050, will we look back on turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi and its obsession with environmental disasters the same way that we look back on 1950s World War 3 spec-fic now? I’ll admit, I have to hope so; that a solution nobody was predicting then (the economic collapse of the USSR) will materialize for climate change in my own lifetime.
The story leaves a bunch of loose ends (two major antagonists escape with some problematic knowledge and technology; there’s no reason additional time travelers won’t eventually show up; the Hive Project is clearly feasible; at least some terraforming of other worlds has been approached) but I suspect a sequel would be less interesting to me because all of the expositive worldbuilding has been done.
Overall: It’s moderately formulaic man-out-of-time spec-fic, and it’s a fast read if you like that sort of thing.
