Finished Kameron Hurley’s God’s War on the Kindle yesterday. Picked up based upon an appearance in Jon Scalzi’s The Big Idea series. An interesting world, and a worthy effort, but I didn’t really connect with the book.
Almost all of the characters are unsympathetic but that usually doesn’t faze me. There’s a heavy religious component, including overtones or maybe even direct references (pardon my ignorance) to Islam. Could have been interesting. Something was lacking though.
I’m pretty sure it was the key “technology” element, bugs. I must have missed it somewhere, or it was simply deus ex machined, but I never even had an intuition as to how bugs fueled things. And lord was the story crawling with bugs. Absent a belief in the science, you’re just back into a historical fiction.
The war didn’t resonate either. Didn’t understand its motivations, mechanics, or dynamics. The supposed perpetual war never really struck me as particularly omnipresent or awful.
I’ll give Hurley credit though. I did catch the connection, tension, and contrasts between Nyx and Rhys, the two main characters. White/black. Female/male. Godless/pious. Corageous(?)/cowardly(?).
Oh, and I have to mention the atrocious typesetting, which is apparently not particularly rare in e-books. There were a number of clear cases where temporal transitions, indicated by increased spacing, were botched. And there’s quite a bit of dialog exchanges that are screwed up. First downside of the Kindle that I’ve run across.