Starfish

Starfish
Peter Watts

There's an inherent danger in over-recommendation. I think it's half the reason Final Fantasy 7 is so reviled at this point in history, it was over-recommended. The eventual backlash against the game was so overwhelming that it has significantly tainted the reputation of every RPG to come out of Japan, and it's possible that the coming (and don't lie, you know it will come) backlash against the backlash against Final Fantasy 7 may be so immense as to destroy our reality.

Such was I think the byproduct of my knowledge of Starfish before reading it. All I knew was it was AWESOME. And that it was about people surgically and technologically modified to be able to survive at the bottom of the ocean.

Starfish wasn't bad. To be honest, I thought it was pretty good. It just wasn't the most amazing, fantastic book I've ever read. Does that mean I'm now participating in the requisite backlash against all the hype I'd experienced because I'm a smartass on the internet? I hope not, the book was still good.

Sort-of-not-really spoiler below:

Good stuff: Interesting view of the future, still dystopian, but less so than your average Atwood sci-fi book. The sort-of but maybe not really lack of an "antagonist" was probably the most interesting aspect of the book to me, as the not-protagonists/but-not-antagonists-either were more compelling than the "main" characters. Some of the terminology was funny, I particularly liked suffering from Nitrogen Narcosis being referred to as getting "narked."

Stuff I didn't really need: All the psychodrama. I know Evangelion is influential, but I don't think every Sci-Fi genre piece published after that pivotal day in the history of Fiction in which Shinji yelled at his dad needs broken characters doing badass stuff brokenly (see: Xenogears.) To me, characterization needs to be more than "was abused and has brown eyes." It was a bit too distracting in the middle of the book, but I got over it after the story moved on.

Grade: B