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Mark and Gerry's Sci-Fi Reviews continue....
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Bad to the Bone... a review of Robert Reed's new novel Marrow
Review by Mark
I have to admit that I have in the past suffered from bouts of insomnia. Miracle of miracles, for the last month I can hardly keep my eyes open when I get in bed! But now I'm afraid the old patterns may reestablish themselves since I have finished Robert Reed's new novel Marrow.
Just over a month ago I began the 340 page journey with great anticipation- the promise seemed so genuine. Humanity, deep in the future has spread and populated a significant part of the galaxy and is coexisting with many other life forms.We are technically advanced and have mastered genetics so that in the absence of catastrophe we can live indefinitely. A Jupiter sized object approaches our galactic neighborhood at 1/3 lightspeed and, as you might expect creates excitement. As usual we enterprising humans get on the ball so to speak. We land on the surface and discover hatches on the surface to the object's interior. The inside is conducive to human existence and right away we set about colonizing and populating the interior. Not to be left behind for long, alien species decide to contest human ownership of the ship, and so for a while humans must fight, helped by the laser weapon system the ship happens to possess. Eventually the attacks stop and the ship's human inhabitants/owners decide that they will admit aliens peacefully that they would not allow to enter by force. The ship becomes a kind of galactic taxi/pleasure cruise line. However the ship remains ruled by humans and the cadre referred to as "captains".
So far so good right? It's a little bit like Arthur C. Clarkes novel Rendezvous with Rama except BIGGER. But this is not the story. The story is actually about a rebellion of some of the inhabitants who for 5000 years are cut off from the rest of the ship's civilization. Re-establishing contact, they go on a holy crusade to establish a mystical religious rule in the ship.
This layering of stories within the novel appears to be a technique the author has adopted as his own. The same path was followed in Beyond the Veil of Stars, and Beneath the Gated Sky both previously reviewed here. The initial story seems big enough and deserves exploration on its own. Instead what you are served is a series of half baked ideas. There's the sentient ship story, the huge ship from outside the galaxy story, the nearly immortal humans story, the human-alien story, and the societal evolution story. How many of these are actually shown justice in 340 pages? The answer is none! What also happens is that the characters are boring and hard to engage as a reader/observer because the whole thing becomes a bit of a heap. It's not that Reed has bad ideas, or is a bad writer. Instead it seems like the author has too many ideas and too little patience with any of them.
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