Genre: Sci-fiction, western
Category: Adult/ General fiction
Content warning: death, violence, murder, gore, animal abuse, homophobic and transphobic comments, badly written
Representation: Maybe there were people of color?
Publisher & publication date: October 5th 2019 via Kindle (self-published)
Booklinks: Goodreads🐛Amazon🐛My Review of Zeelam by Navin Weerartne a.k.a “Zeelam by Navin Weeraratne is a misery to read: Rant Review”
Rating: 1.5/5
Summary
A scientist has sold out the human race.
A settler-scientist hires a bounty hunter to help find her sister – feared murdered by intelligent, insect-like creatures. Clues lead then to the boomtown of Ashridge, where a senior researcher has disappeared. As it emerges that all as not right, a deep conspiracy is discovered. One that those involved will stop at nothing to protect.
Hunted by the authorities, plagued by the “bugs,” and even airship pirates, they must uncover the conspiracy. Will that bring the main perpetrator to justice, or start a bidding war for her research – and with it, the fate of the planet?
Review
I had low expectations but I am still disappointed.
Much like “The Man from the Sky” by Navin Weeraratne my review will be disordered, repetitive and somewhat incoherent with random scientific jargon tossed in for good measure. I tried to make this review balanced and in-depth but I kept getting annoyed and ended up listing all the things that annoyed me about it. Warning! This is a long spoiler-filled rant review, please enjoy.
This was meant to be a second chance since I didn’t like Zeelam much. I thought a sci-fi western with monsters would be more my speed. And while this was much more enjoyable it was still not great in a technical sense.
The writing itself was competent and easy to read for the most part. What I disliked was the author’s writing “choices.” He had a frankly immature guy humor that I found rather mean spirited and unfunny. A couple times he made sexist, homophobic and transphobic jokes- while I don’t think it was his intention it was still irksome and unpleasant to read.
This novella could have gone through a couple more rounds of structural editing. You know what’s worse than telling instead of showing? Doing both telling and showing! The author very clearly establishes an even or character or plot point in one chapter but then proceeds to show the same events in a later chapter! It was such a slog to read the same event from different perspectives without actually learning anything new. For example (mild spoilers) in the first chapter Alex says she is looking for her sister who went missing. It was clear and well established! But then in subsequent chapters the author writes about her sister going missing (from her pov) and then in a following chapter writes about when Alex hears the news of her sister going missing and deciding to go look for her! What was the point of that besides page filler? It might have been slightly better if the chapters were in chronological order.
While more of a personal preference I disliked that the chapters weren’t in chronological order. There was a lot if redundant and repetitive information and some things could have been edited out. Not to mention, it makes it hard to follow exactly when an event is happening in relation to the events in the other chapters.
One thing I liked was the mixed media approach where emails and novel extracts were used for exposition and world building. Reminded me of Foundation and I found it expanded the world and scope of the story as well as made otherwise boring exposition engaging.
While I understand that this is the first part in a series I still would expect a complete and coherent story. So many things were set up and never paid off! Story lines were left hanging! It wasn’t even a cliff hanger but incomplete??? The main plot that was set up at the beginning (i. e. Alex wanting to find her missing sister and the missing scientist) were never really resolved? It would be too generous to say it was foreshadowing since it was more dangling loose threads. Fuck sake, it seriously feels like the author just split a single book up and took no effort to make each novella a complete satisfying work. The climax felt like something dramatic that just happened and mostly disconnected with the main plot. There was no rising tension of the story! There was no coherent storytelling- only a tenuously connected series of scenes.
The plot and the story itself are rather basic. Other than the setting and ‘science’ there isn’t anything new or inovative about the story or characters. A lot of the story felt very familiar? In fact I kept getting an eerily deja-vu feeling as if I had already read similar scenes in other stories? The book felt like a quilt of moments and scenes taken from other works and clumsily stitched together.
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The author also had some writing quirks which were just annoying. He insisted on having multiple perspectives which lead to repetition of information and a hard to follow chronology of events. Even then, with his omniscient pov he barely even stuck to the perspective in the title of the chapter, often choosing to tell the story from a random minor character or head hoping. He would also refer to characters by random descriptions like ‘one eyed man’ or ‘dating coach’ for an entire chapter even if their name is mentioned? They in one chapter he would refer to the character as ‘Boy’ as if it was his name? Was it his name???? Why was it capitalized?
The author also had a weird habit of randomly marking scene breaks in a chapter even if the scene continued from the same place after the break rather than starting a new scene? It was like he was using it like a break for a commercial in a tv show which bizzare in a novel when reading and you see a scene break where there is no change in scene or time or pov. Personally I’d recommend the author learning to write one perspective well rather than try to write multiple perspectives poorly. He has a lot of amateurish writing habits he needa to grow out of.
There was also sexist, homophobic, transphobic and at time ableist undertow in the story. I don’t know why but the almost casual, unintentionally way it was soaked into the story was unpleasant. It reminded me why I avoid sff by straight white men. All the characters except maybe one is coded white with very white names. One cyborg was coded Black and I’m only guessing that because they had dread locs but they might in fact be white. There was also homophobic and transphobic jokes made around this character which was somewhat uncomfortable. It is possible there were other people of color with white names that I might have assumed to be white because there was very little description to suggest otherwise.
It’s odd how white the cast of characters are considering it is a space western set in the future and lots of cowboys were Black and Latinx. Maybe in the future only white people were allowed to travel to new planet colonies or only western cultures were taken to new planets. Either one has a lot of racist undertones that were probably unintentional and the author didn’t think about or want to unpack.
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The “science” was iffy at best and distracting when it was so obviously incoherent. I don’t mind vague/basically magic ‘science’ in sci fi and while including real world concepts and inspiration can be interesting but it is glaringly obvious when its is misunderstood by the author. I prefer to think he is simply inept in conveying his scientific inspiration because otherwise his frankly obnoxious attempts to use real science to give his world depth fail spectacularly.
The author seems pretty chuffed with himself for putting real science into his sci-fi novel but I personally found it obnoxious and pretentious. I love science and I loved how he referenced various microbial phenomenon like living under extreme conditions or how some microbes metabolize radioactive material.
I was also low key triggered every time he said graphene. While I understand he meant the material was some kind of graphene composite it felt like he used it as a hand wave explanation for why a material or structure was strong or bullet proof. Frankly if he used vibranium or crystals or fairy dust in the same it would make little difference.
He was also inconsistent in the way the properties of the GrApHeNe materials were used. The bug chitin which was graphene based was used by people for armor yet the bug themselves used iron armor because their chitin wasn’t strong enough. So why wouldn’t the soldiers use chitin instead of using iron armor?
In another occasion it was stated the bugs’ chitin shells get fossilized but their bones do not because they are more edible??? It is completely contradictory to what was made clear earlier in the novel where it was stated the bugs bones were super strong since it is based on graphene matrix (which is in place of the osteoid matrix human bones have). So why would they be digested? Are the lifeforms very good at breaking down the graphene composite of the bones but unable to break down the graphene composite of the chitin shells? An while rare soft tissue can also be fossilized so why can’t the bugs’ bones be fossilized? I am aware I put more thought into it that the author but these inconsistencies bothered me so much while reading. I’m not even going to touch how while a graphene composite material would be ‘strong’ it would not have the same hardness or rigidity that is required of a endoskeleton that our own calcium-phosphate mineral based bones have. What I am wondering is if these bugs are floppy boned? Did the author actually mean they had a diamond based bone matrix???
Also it’s laughable how the author named the bugs with hard graphene based exoskeletons “antracoderms” which means carbon-skinned. Sir! Everything is carbon skinned! Human skin is carbon skinned! Especially since there was a whole spiel about how calling them ‘bone’ skinned or ‘plate’ skinned would be incorrect? Surely saying graphene skinned or diamond skinned would be more technically accurate than carbon skinned.
The author clearly confuses graphene and graphite and their properties. He also had no clear idea how small nanoscale objects are? Sir, nanobots like those that were described in the novel are very unlikely. Unless they were made by some sort of biological fabrication, you are trying to suggest machines that are smaller than a human cell (so lets say the size of a virus) can do anything suggested it could do in the novel. If, even hypothetically creating a CPU so small, manufacturing billions of tiny robots on any large scale is not economical. What makes it clearer that the author does not know how small the nano-scale is, a weapon was described as being nano-serrated as if that would be at all important or impressive? Even the sharpest knife would likely be nano-serrated! Having nano-serrations would not impact the efficacy of a bladed weapon??? It would just be sharp???
I included a diagram to show how small the nanoscale is (approximately 1000-1nm)
The fact that the airships were filled with hydrogen made me want to cry! It was so so dumb! Hydrogen is so incredibly flammable especially if you are using heated coils to heat it up! Maybe it would be fine if it was a closed system with no oxygen but it is not a closed system, because hydrogen escapes the high pressure balloons??????? Which is then replaced by making more hydrogen by electrolyzing water???
I was also irked by how everyone used thorium powered generators for energy generation instead of using the abundant geothermal energy to generate power? I mean, at least for heating houses they could have used geothermal power! And if they can generate electricity they could have ground level green houses using light lamps and use geothermal heat to warm green houses. Plus I’m a little bothered they used tons of soil for their flying greenhouses instead of using hydroponics which would be much lighter.
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The footnotes are annoying and distracting and misused. Not only it is frankly obnoxious to put citations in a fiction novel he rarely followed a proper format. Half the citations were links to Wikipedia pages or Youtube videos or his personal opinions and observations. I included my least favorite footnote which frankly destroyed any remaining respect I had for the story, plus it highlights the tone of jokes in this novel.
My conversation with a friend after reading the above section, sending her a screenshot and complaining about how painful it is to read.
Overall
I don’t recommend The Man from the Sky, unless that is, you enjoy suffering and reading poorly written books for ‘fun’.
The fact that this is meant to be “hard science fiction” is a bigger joke than any of the humour attempted in the novel which was either gross, lame or offensive. I hope before his next attempt at “hard” sci-fi Weeraratne gets someone with at least a basic understanding of chemistry or biology to proof read his work.
If I even attempt to read another one of this authors books please slap me upside the head and tell me “NO”. Save me from myself.
Rating:🐛/5
I do however recommend reading my review of Zeelam which is equally ranty.
Booklinks: Goodreads🐛Amazon🐛My Review of Zeelam by Navin Weerartne a.k.a “Zeelam by Navin Weeraratne is a misery to read: Rant Review”
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