The first few chapters of the book were not only promising, but the praise that the author received ("The most brilliant science fiction mind on any planet", Rolling Stone) helped convince me that this was going to be an excellent novel. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the second half of the book and my final opinion is that one can skip this book altogether.
I suppose it is to be expected that certain science fiction books start looking odd when the future they were imagining starts diverging from what actually happened in the future. Yes, this book tries to conceive a world with an alternative history but I am sure that even if Germany and Japan had won the Second World War, certain technological advances, such as being able to read the newspaper on your smartphone instead of having to wait for physical copies to be delivered, would come first than the ability to colonise other planets. Even though these discrepancies in the history of technological advances are fairly common in the novel, they are not enough to invalidate the whole story. Yet, certain aspects of the book, specifically the racist comments against white people and the anti-semitic remarks, seemed to me quite gratuitous.
Trying to imagine a world where Germany and Japan won the Second World War is indeed a difficult thing to do, but I think this book does a bad job in its attempt.
I suppose it is to be expected that certain science fiction books start looking odd when the future they were imagining starts diverging from what actually happened in the future. Yes, this book tries to conceive a world with an alternative history but I am sure that even if Germany and Japan had won the Second World War, certain technological advances, such as being able to read the newspaper on your smartphone instead of having to wait for physical copies to be delivered, would come first than the ability to colonise other planets. Even though these discrepancies in the history of technological advances are fairly common in the novel, they are not enough to invalidate the whole story. Yet, certain aspects of the book, specifically the racist comments against white people and the anti-semitic remarks, seemed to me quite gratuitous.
Trying to imagine a world where Germany and Japan won the Second World War is indeed a difficult thing to do, but I think this book does a bad job in its attempt.
