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A five-person spaceship crew hears a distress call from a long-lost luxury spaceship. They board it, hoping for salvage wealth, and discover that everyone onboard the ship died under violent and mysterious circumstances. It's basically a haunted house in space... and the only way to claim salvage rights is to get inside and pilot it back.
Despite the blatant similarities to Alien, Aliens, and Event Horizon, I love apocalypse logs and "stuck in a haunted house," so I was predisposed to like this. On the plus side, it has some haunting spooky images, like a mass of bodies floating in zero g above a ballroom floor, and enough creepiness and suspense that I actually finished it. On the minus side, everything else.
The writing is clunky. The science fiction setting doesn't feel likely or lived-in - it's full of references that are old-fashioned now. The most plausible part is the predatory corporations. The characters are barely characterized at all, and while we're told that the protagonist Claire's main trait is that she's emotionally closed off, what we mostly see is that she's miserable and insecure and bad at her job. The other four characters have about one trait each. There's an interminable framing device in which she's telling the story while being accused of murdering her crew. The explanation of what's going on is mildly clever yet somehow less interesting than "it's ghosts."
( Read more... )
Despite the blatant similarities to Alien, Aliens, and Event Horizon, I love apocalypse logs and "stuck in a haunted house," so I was predisposed to like this. On the plus side, it has some haunting spooky images, like a mass of bodies floating in zero g above a ballroom floor, and enough creepiness and suspense that I actually finished it. On the minus side, everything else.
The writing is clunky. The science fiction setting doesn't feel likely or lived-in - it's full of references that are old-fashioned now. The most plausible part is the predatory corporations. The characters are barely characterized at all, and while we're told that the protagonist Claire's main trait is that she's emotionally closed off, what we mostly see is that she's miserable and insecure and bad at her job. The other four characters have about one trait each. There's an interminable framing device in which she's telling the story while being accused of murdering her crew. The explanation of what's going on is mildly clever yet somehow less interesting than "it's ghosts."
( Read more... )
