TL;DR: Alice goes down a rabbit hole of Gates to find the home planet of a long lost war machine/AI and gets chased along the way. I have no clear view of the world or how things worked but it was still pretty fun?
Source: NetGalley, Thank you to the publisher!!
Plot: Alice finds an old AI masquerading as a fancy lava lamp and ends up getting chased and attacked while she hunts down a way to release the mind inside.
Characters: We didn’t get a lot of details on many of these characters, primarily we focused on Alice and her journey throughout the novel
Setting: I truly wish I could tell you more about the setting and what was happening. Alice is the last human and jumps between worlds via ‘Gates’. She visited so many strange worlds, but nothing was solidly built. Which was very disappointing for the SF fan in me.
Science Fiction: As mentioned above this is written much more as ‘science magic’ with very little hard edges to the SF. Don’t come looking for details or explanations.
Thoughts:
Unexploded Remnants is a very short, very action packed novella about the last human in the cosmos on the run to protect the sentient mind trapped in a war machine. I’m not entirely sure what I expected going in, but it definitely wasn’t what I got – and I’m not mad at it!
Alice is a the last human, taken in by the Archive, shortly before the death of humanity due to our own folly and infighting. She lives and learns how to barter and trade information and relics with the Archive, a giant alien depository of such things, and has spent centuries of time doing just that. We’re told all of this, not shown it, but Alice utilizes these pre-existing contacts on her journey. She picks up Gunn (as she names him) at a market and is immediately targeted and the chase begins.
My biggest complaint in this novella was the setting, as we didn’t get a enough details to really feel or see the worlds and planets we travelled through. Alice jumps through ‘Gates’ which take her from planet to planet randomly or intentionally depending on what she inputs and she’s never fully lost, just wandering. It definitely felt very Alice in Wonderland in vibes but left me scratching my head and asking questions I don’t like asking. What did she eat? What about a poo? It was very fast and light on details which pulled me out.
When I was able to ignore my questions and spats of confusion, the story was good! I was very intrigued. This is the rare novella for me that I think actually suffered from not being longer. This could easily have been a novel, especially with the themes that Elaine Gallagher was attempting to explore. A full length novel with just this premise? I would eat that like candy. As a novella it was fun, but a bit lacking.
3.5 out of 5 cleaning gels (that was strange, TBH)Â
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