Arkhangelsk 1 - Overall Impressions
What were your overall impressions of Archangelsk? Concept? Plotting? Characterization? Writing?
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Comments
The writing was sound and competent but never to my eyes vivid or exciting, and I was left with the impression that the crew of both ships were kind of flat. Yes, they got cross about things but that didn't come over to me as something visceral, more like annoyance or frustration. Now, maybe this was a deliberate way of saying that both crews were completely squashed by their various experiences - which would be reasonable given how grim things were - but it still felt a bit, well, monochrome to me.
It was quite fun and mostly rattled along. I liked that the viewpoint characters were mature adults rather than the over-emotional teenagers that are in a lot of fiction.
The plotting with the Exiles was a bit ham-fisted. We knew from the beginning they existed, so there was a chunk of "Chekov's Gun" with them, waiting for them to turn up in the book.
I liked how the book pointed at deeper and larger themes, like the meaning of life and how we deal with disasters, parenting, without laying it on too thick.
I enjoyed the novel itself reasonably well, apart from the nagging 'how come these Russians are so American?' doubts. It was probably a bit longer than it needed to be, but not too egregiously.
My overall impression is that it had everything a good book has, except a soul.
The concept is good, if a little bit too much like those old Star Trek episodes where the Enterprise visits a Nazi / Native American / Robot / whatever world.
The plotting is adequate, but no more than that.
The individual characterisation is fine, but the group dynamics were poor - every principal character has the same goal and motivation (must be good for the group), but conflicts with the others because SECRETS, which are kept even from the reader, because without a twist there is no reason to read this book.
The writing was competent on the sentence and paragraph level, but above that I am wondering why bother?
I enjoyed this one. I thought it was well paced and the plot kept me engaged for most of it. Prose was solid. Will I remember most of the details in a year? Hard to say. I appreciate books that have a creeping feeling of inevitable doom about them, where you can't quite figure out if maybe there isn't a way out. This one was "close" to that, but never quite felt like failure was a possibility, which is too bad. I liked how the two parties escaped earth only to plough straight into the same problems yet again. I'd read more by her.
I think there's more to the book than you give it credit for. I think it raised some interesting questions, even if it didn't do a good job of proposing answers to them.
The questions that came to mind for me are:
I'd probably add to that as an enhancement of your first bullet point "at what point do different people simply give up the struggle for survival"?
Wasn't sure where else to put this, but one of the other parts I liked about this book is that it was a pseudo first-contact story. It's been SO long since the settlement had seen any humans and they believed they were gone. There was so much fear between the two parties but they also really needed something from one another.
It made me wonder about what would have happened if you had an Amish community set off into the stars (I mean they wouldn't for technology reasons of course) and then a thousand years later humans showed up and wanted to interact. What sort of fear and "the world has come back to corrupt us" would that look like?