Dreamships

Rating:
Summary: Good idea; poor execution
Review: At first blush, I was intrigued by the situation this book presented. I was looking forward to a really good read, but unfortunately I was disappointed by the way Scott handled her plot. The action plodded when I wanted it to move quickly, and then sped through a lot that I thought needed more attention. The last fifth of the book, in my eyes, deserved four-fifths of the page count, and vice versa.To balance all that, I did enjoy the descriptions of the technology for the most part, and the environment in particular. The overall plot was good, even allowing for the odd expansion/compression mentioned above. As a whole, however, it just wasn't enough to draw me all the way in.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: I had read "Dreaming Metal" before I read this book and picked up "Dreamships" in anticipation. I was a little disappointed. I felt the book moved slowly at the beginning, although I liked the concept of piloting a ship using virtual images. I knew from reading "Dreaming Metal" what some of the plot had to be, and found the confrontation between Reverdy and Manfred to be tamer than I had expected.

Overall, the technology and the relationships between the people in this story kept me interested enough to finish the book.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: I had read "Dreaming Metal" before I read this book and picked up "Dreamships" in anticipation. I was a little disappointed. I felt the book moved slowly at the beginning, although I liked the concept of piloting a ship using virtual images. I knew from reading "Dreaming Metal" what some of the plot had to be, and found the confrontation between Reverdy and Manfred to be tamer than I had expected.

Overall, the technology and the relationships between the people in this story kept me interested enough to finish the book.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: I had read "Dreaming Metal" before I read this book and picked up "Dreamships" in anticipation. I was a little disappointed. I felt the book moved slowly at the beginning, although I liked the concept of piloting a ship using virtual images. I knew from reading "Dreaming Metal" what some of the plot had to be, and found the confrontation between Reverdy and Manfred to be tamer than I had expected.

Overall, the technology and the relationships between the people in this story kept me interested enough to finish the book.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing Utopia/Dystopia writing
Review: Melissa Scott did an excellent job examining aspects of society and technology. Once you get past all the technical terms you can get so much out of it. I love the ironic ending as well. I had to reread it just to make sure I had read it correctly. I highly recommend this book to people who enjoy challenging their minds to comprehend things they've never even thought of before.

Rating:
Summary: Unreadable
Review: Melissa Scott has won a shelf full of awards and pulled in heady praise from serious science fiction critics. Perhaps her other books are worthy of it. "Dreamships", however, lacks even the most basic building blocks of a good novel. Where to begin. That's Scott's problem to be sure. The plot, involving a spaceship's management software gaining sentience and a mysterious social activist who believes that thinking computers deserve legal and social recognition, doesn't even get started until the book is half over. The first hundred pages are the ship's crew wandering around a space station talking to various people. After that, we get almost another full hundred of space flight, and the main character admiring the ship's fancy decorations. Look, here's the problem. Bi' Jian and her comrades just aren't interesting. If you want to write a book about a living computer, then you have to write a book about a living computer. Tagging on five chapters of filler before the book's main issue comes up will sink just about any project.

Beyond that, the discerning reader will notice something else missing: style. The Titans of cyberpunk, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, are not universally liked; some folks find them long-winded. However, it's tough to argue that they don't have attitude. "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" both deploy a tidal wave of frantic prose to match their frantic storylines, and scathing dialgoue for their scathing characters. "Dreamships", in this regard, totally fails to deliver. It's clear that Scott has ideas. She has a picture of a highly concentrated, highly stessed futuristic society. But her writing just doesn't get that picture across to the reader, and the characters have no voice whatsoever.

The folks at Tor certainly aren't doing Scott any favors by hyping her as comparable to Robert Heinlein and Alfred Bester. At its best, "Dreamships" looks like a typical freshman effort by an author with a handful of ideas but insufficient experience. And at its worse, well, that's best left unsaid.