Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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This was a mostly good science fiction novel (with some light horror mixed in) that could have been great if the ending had been handled better. The book has excellent world-building, strong characterization, and an interesting plot--or at least it starts out that way.

The characters are developed through a series of intimate psychological sketches. We live through their traumas, hopes, and fears, and the writing is genuinely impressive. The setting is also unique, richly detailed, and nicely realized with as much attention paid to political and economic systems as to more conventional "hard" sci-fi world building. As the book moves along, mysteries are introduced, explored at a leisurely pace, and partially resolved. Towards the end, the book gradually begins dipping over into horror or Weird fiction, and I found myself getting genuinely excited to see how it would all get tied up at the end.

But it never did. In contrast to the somewhat languid pace in the middle of the book, the last parts of the book began accelerating sharply, and developing in ways that seemed to make less and less sense. Major plot points that had been building are resolved entirely "off camera" (in implausible ways), and are only addressed after the fact in a few desultory lines of dialog. Characters begin to behave in ways that are highly unrealistic, or that retroactively introduce continuity problems into the narrative. But the action just keeps rising towards some kind of climax, and...

Then it just ends. Not in the middle of a sentence or anything, but there's no indication in the last chapter that you've reached the end of the book. Several major plot points (some long simmering and others introduced only a few pages prior!) are entirely unresolved. I was reading this book in an electronic format and briefly thought my copy was defective or missing some chapters--that's how abrupt the ending was.

My initial assumption was that the author was just crassly queuing up a sequel by building up a huge head of steam and then ending in the middle of things, but the author has commented online that the book is intended to be standalone and no sequels are planned (although there is allegedly an epilogue short story being published at some point).

I can live with an abrupt ending as a statement or a narrative technique, and I don't need a book to have perfect continuity or answer all my questions about the plot. But I need to understand what the author is trying to say by cutting things off in the middle, and I need the plot to be internally consistent enough that I can suspend my disbelief. To be blunt, the last sections of the book just seem sloppy and do violence to all of the author's painstaking work earlier in the book.

Which is a shame, because most of the book is excellent; it's very rare I wish a book were longer, but I would have cheerfully read another 50 or even 100 pages to reach a plausible stopping point. This would have been a four or five star book if the last sections were even half as good as the earlier parts. As it stands, I enjoyed most of it, but can't really recommend it.