11,000 Years by
Mark Roth-Whitworth
My rating:
2 of 5 stars
This is a 2-star review. It would have been a 1-star review but for the dearth of spelling and grammar errors.
This book was sold to me by the author under the premise that it contained all of the elements that made golden-age speculative fiction great. It does not include those elements.
Instead, the book leaves the reader with the feeling that a fan gets when going to see their favorite author/singer/actor live and gets stuck looking at a cardboard cutout displaying the author/singer/actor's likeness.
The early sections of the book are indeed populated by cardboard characters. They are flying on the Spaceship Cardboard. Their leader is Captain Cardboard. One of the crew is Frenchie Cardboard (no relation to the captain). Frenchie is French. She is the only character that speaks in an accent to let you know that she is French. Just in case you missed it, she wears a beret later in the book.
The Captain is a stoic and heroic figure who everyone admires even after he purposefully avoids dealing with events that will drive his ship close to a black hole in a maneuver that throws his ship a titular 11,000 years in the future. All he had to do was point the ship in a different direction a couple of days early and the rest of the story need not happen.
There are religious people on the ship. A few. The only overtly Christian character ends up sodomizing his gay roommate to death and then killing himself.
Ah, the nuance. That's probably the only word this author cannot spell.
We learn that even though the ship is in the middle of a crisis, the crew has a union that must be consulted before the captain can do anything. All great explorations involved union labor or something.
After the ship is heading off to discover what has happened to humanity in the intervening millennia, we switch to one of the main human multi-system civilizations. Essentially, all of humanity's major religions have been homogenized and combined to create a massive theocracy that oppresses everyone in service to no particular diety whatsoever.
At this point, the book cribs notes from the vastly superior work of Robert A. Heinlein. In particular, the book picks up some plot points from Revolt in 2100; where a young man of faith seeks to save a young woman of faith and then ends up finding out that their religion is a sham. Except, in this case, they keep believing in the religion and work to make it better.
The author seems to think that the sole purpose of religion is to engage in hypocrisy.
We return to the SS Cardboard which manages to fight off an attack from the pseudo-religious civilization. They run for the shelter provided by a second civilization.
With those two civilizations in conflict, a diplomatic meeting is arranged. The crew from the SS Cardboard is brought in to help observe and moderate.
A crew that is missing 11,000 years worth of knowledge, understanding, and context about the development of current human civilizations is deemed to be appropriate moderators for a diplomatic meeting.
Dorothy Parker's ghost had been impatiently tapping her foot for some time. This book was heaved across the room with great relish.
Run away from this book and go find something good to read. Like a grocery store coupon circular.
View all my reviews
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The author came in contact with me regarding this review. And after a bit of retrospection, I think that an update is in order.
The 2-star rating is going to stay. That is how good this book is.
But, I do think it is worthwhile to boil down my criticisms.
1. Cardboard characters.
The author spent a lot of time making sure that the characters are diverse. He described their color, gender, and nation of origin in great detail. But he didn't do anything to differentiate their characters. Except for the French lady. She had an accent. And a beret.
2. The captain is well respected even though his leadership directly results in the ship traveling perilously close to the event horizon and tossing it 11,000 years in the future. The crew still looks up to him after that massive screwup.
3. This is an exploratory ship and not a cruise ship. It travels into hazardous regions where quick decisions have to be made. Yet the captain must get permission from the union before setting a course. Never in the course of human history has such a thing happened.
Private sector unions are great organizations under most circumstances. A ship on an expedition to a remote location isn't one of those circumstances. Save the virtue signaling for another time.
4. The middle section of the book was actually pretty interesting. The two main characters were going places, doing things, and revealing the fictional world in an entertaining way. Unfortunately, the entire arrangement seemed heavily cribbed from Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100".
At least in "Revolt in 2100", the characters realized that their theocratic state was bad/evil/destructive and then left it. In this book, our heroes identify the problem and...stay the course. It just doesn't make any sense.
5. The theocracy is presented as an amalgamation of all of humanity's religions. The author seems not to understand that beyond the belief in a "higher power", religions simply are not the same. You cannot unplug Buddhism and insert Hoahaoism despite the latter being an offshoot of the former. Small differences become very important to believers. Belief in one conception of "God" is not the same as all other belief systems. Just ask the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics.
6. Later on, the crew that was tossed forward in time by 11,000 years gets asked to serve as arbitrators for a diplomatic meeting. People who have missed out on 11,000 years of human history and evolution are then expected to navigate and negotiate the differences between two conflicting empires. That would be worse than asking Gilgamesh to facilitate negotiations between North Korea and Japan in 2023.
Quite frankly, the author does not appear to know how people relate to one another. He knows how he imagines that people relate to one another. But he's got no clue about how the real world works. And it shows.
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
