damerell

"Mishima activates her crowdcutter and it springs from its microcrimped home in the clasps on her dress, a transparent vinyl shell shaped like a shark fin that lets her scythe through the mass of people glomming toward the sign."

Dear author, you have just aimed for cool cyberpunk gadgetry, tripped over your own feet, and landed face-first in the cowpat of utter absurdity; and you have done it in the first chapter, which is not a good start.

What crowd lets you push through it because you're cosplaying as an icebreaker, rather than telling you to fuck off? The thing must have significant structural integrity, and it's not made of gizmodium, so she's been lugging around several kilos of spring-loaded vinyl (which must have to be properly anchored to her, so she's also in some sort of harness) on the off-chance that this specific problem arises, like James Bond if Q was precognitive [1]. Does her dress sometimes go BDOIOIOING unexpectedly? Is she some kind of Swiss Army Knife of unfolding vinyl devices, like a po-faced Inspector Gadget?

More seriously I've just given up on the book because - well, because _Too Like the Lightning_ reminded me that it is not worth finishing a book that makes me go "aaargh, shut up, author" every four pages. Here we are being beaten vigorously with the exposition stick at every opportunity; the author makes a particularly bold move in writing "the rush of exposition in the airport comes as a shock, especially on such little sleep" as a precursor to delivering the lump of exposition, not that it is greatly distinguished from the exposition that surrounds it. Come back, Becky Chambers' "describe the ships to me like I am a child", all is forgiven.

"JaBoDeTaBekBan, the urban conglomeration with Jakarta at its heart, has" a fucking implausible name, like I don't think anyone goes around gobbing up that mouthful on a regular basis, and that's about as far as I got.

As a result, my final objection might be wrong, because there may well be another lump of exposition coming, but it looks to me like the world is sorted into tens of thousands of, well, constituencies each of which elect a single political party on a FPTP basis, and there's a rich tapestry of dozens of political parties; now, one of the many odd things about FPTP is it tends to encourage political parties to agglomerate into vast blobs, so how's that work?

This was my first novel-length No Award this year.

[1] indeed, in IIRC Goldeneye Bond's car has a popup attachment for cutting cables strung across the road at a highly specific height, and sportingly the bad guys string a cable across the road at just that height.