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Sunday, April 12, 2015

Hugh Howery's Sand Omnibus

Sand Omnibus (Sand, #1-5)Sand Omnibus by Hugh Howey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this book. It is dystopian science fiction, one of my favorite genre's of novel. Yet, here, though society had crumbled and humanity was struggling, something felt too clean, too nice.

I suppose the issue starts with the characters. No one in the book seems to really be affected by the world. To a degree this is understandable as it is the world they grew up in. Yet there is no anger or resentment, in fact, there is hardly any desire to do anything from any character.

Of the family this book features only on character seems to care or be affected by just how hard and grating the world is. He is the solitary stone that the sands are wearing down. Everyone else is simply there, a single piece to move the story along.

Now, while all characters are there to move the story forward, they must still have some sort of personality. I do not mean that they much have a job or some profession that defines them as people are rarely solely defined by what they do. The reason I say this is because that is exactly what the author does. Your job determines you and your action.

To put in bluntly, these characters are flat. They have very little personality and no psychology. We are not shown there passions, resentments, or angers through their actions or dialogue. None of that is important here.

As far as I can tell the author's main concern was to build a desolate world and at that he has succeeded, though I doubt he meant to make his characters match his expressionless land.

Sadly, the only saving grace are the ideas and even those, it seems, are buried beneath the endless, hungry sands.


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