I enjoyed this book, but I think it was on occasion too technical. I didn't always feel like going into so much detail about computer stuff, so maybe I missed something, but I had the feeling some of the stuff was a little unrealistic, especially towards the end.
On the other hand, it had one of the better relationships I've seen in SF: between two partners who both had their strengths and who supported each other. Yes, there were class differences and physical strength differences in the way you would expect (lower-class man with mental abilities that emphasize physical strength and upper-class woman), but there was only mutual respect, and the woman was quite strong in her own mental abilities, which allowed her to be a full partner in physical altercations, as well as in the search for the serial killer. This was a relationship between adults without any of the immaturity you don't only find in young-adult books. ( )

I really liked this book! Some intriguing turns of phrase, a love story to tug the heart (even though it somehow stayed stand-offish throughout), and a mystery that kept you guessing to the final pages. ( )

The scope of this novel’s setting is what initially drew me to pick up this book. Noah, a planetary-sized spaceship has left a devastated Earth and is traveling to a nearby to Canaan, a nearby star. They have travelled a third of the distance in approximately 350 years and still have about twice as many years before they reach their destination. So many generations have passed that its citizens don’t truly know what happened or how they were gifted with alien technology. It appears that human memories can be eliminated or created. The spaceship is so vast it possesses simulated day and night cycles with an artificial sun and stars and climates which include periodic rain and snow. Noah is so vast that it contains various biomes of redwood forests, lakes and desert terrains. There are city streets lined with skyscrapers, cafes and shops. All are tied together with roads requiring buses and trains for transportation.

The protagonist of this novel is Hana Dempsey, who is introduced when she awakens from a nine-month “vacation” known as Breeding Day, a lottery in which fertile women are selected to become impregnated through artificial insemination and give birth without ever seeing the child again. Hana is a city planner administrator and computer genius who possesses telekinetic abilities she uses in urban planning. Her lover, a genetically enhanced policeman Leonard Barrens requests Hana’s hacking skills in investigating a series of related murders. Additionally, there also appear to be several early retirements. On the Noah, when someone retires, they individual is whisked away never to be seen again. (Reminded me of the source for Soylent Green). Their investigation begins to receive negative attention from the ship’s administration.

If you are a reader whose habit is to ditch the book after 100 disinterested pages, you will do it with this book. I found it to have a very slow start. It picked up for the remainder of the book, but occasionally fell into boring troughs, especially when the prose became technical. I oscillated between giving it two and three stars settling on the latter because there was enough surprises and a poignant ending to make it so. ( )

At first this seems like your basic generational space ship journey to a new planet. The people on board the ship are equipped with brain implants at adolescence, which boost their psychic powers to amazing levels, and they are tested in order to be placed on the job tracks for which they are most suited. It's a rigid society, but it's one that will enable them to not only survive the lengthy journey, but deliver a thriving population to their destination.

Hana has just come back from Breeding Duty, a 9 month, fully-sedated and fully-paid vacation. She's having trouble easing back into her life and she's having strange longings to hold her baby--something she'll never do because it's the job of Keepers to raise children and her job is in City Planning. Her friends throw her a party to welcome her back, and not long after, Leon Barrens, her Peace Officer bruiser friend asks her to help him solve a mystery.

There are deaths occurring all over the ship. Horrible deaths, in which there is nothing left of the body but tattered pieces. And there are strange sightings of impossible monstrous creatures. He wants to know what's going on, and she wants to help him. As their love blossoms and the mystery deepens, they find themselves at odds with their society and running for their lives.

There was so much I liked about this book. There were mysteries on top of mysteries, secrets that were too much for anyone to bear, and histories that had to be hidden. Hana's journey was fascinating to me, from her initial longings for her child, to her determination to protect everyone from knowledge that could destroy everything, and her eventual transformation. Barrens was just my type, the stoic hero I enjoy reading about. I always enjoy the trope of becoming what you hate/fear and this book does that trope extremely well. Great stuff.

(Provided by publisher) ( )

[Cross-posted to Knite Writes]

Plot

On a massive ship called the Noah, heading for a new Earth to replace one lost in an unremembered apocalypse, a woman named Hana is approached by her close policeman friend to solve a mystery. People have been dying mysteriously, their bodies reduced to bits and pieces, and Barrens, the policeman, wants to find out the truth and solve what was possibly the murder of a long-time friend of his.

Unfortunately, on the Noah, where a strict regime controls the flow of information and “deals with” all those who attempt to subvert the system, Hana and Barrens must act carefully in order to discover a truth those who control the ship want to keep hidden.

But Hana uses what programming skills she possesses to create a program that searches the Nth Web for information relevant to their mystery, and soon, it grows powerful enough to start producing relevant results. As Barrens and Hana grow closer, relationship-wise and in their interest in finding out the truth, they both have to keep up appearances at their day jobs.

It’s hard to stay focused, however, when the rabbit hole seems endless. Barrens and Hana discover mysterious death after mysterious death, all labeled as “Mincemeat” deaths, stories of monsters in the tunnels beneath their precious ship city, and the nagging impression that women’s mandated Breeding Duty (which is exactly what it sounds like), complete with nine-month stasis, isn’t what is seems.

As Hana and Barrens begin to question the system more and more, they one day stumble onto a memory hiding in the Nth Web — a memory that clearly shows the Noah is not of human but of alien origins. And the plot begins to thicken. A ship with capabilities far beyond what human beings can understand. Technology that has given normal humans virtual psychic superpowers. It didn’t come from humanity. It came from another, much smarter race, that, for whatever reason, is no longer around.

Barrens apparently comes across information even more dangerous, and he leaves Hana behind to protect her, disappearing and joining a resistance force. But Hana doesn’t stay safe for long. Eventually, ISec, the Ministry of Information, targets her for her connection to Barrens, and she is imprisoned for several weeks.

When ISec finally speaks to her, one of their most powerful representatives, a woman named Karla, injects a massive amount of data into Hana’s mind, and allows her to escape from ISec in the hopes that Hana will use her influence to stop Barrens’ budding resistance force before it jeopardizes the entire mission. Unfortunately, Hana discovers that Barrens’ force is but one cell is a growing number, each with different leaders who have different motives and struggle to work together.

As Barrens and his comrades continue their missions to uncover what the ship’s crew is hiding from everyone else, they eventually find a massive uncharted section of the ship, where terrifying monsters are kept in check by the the strongest Enforcers available. Barely. And, in horror, Barrens and Hana realize that the monsters are, in fact, their children. The children of humanity are monsters. And the children of the monsters are humanity. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong in human history.

The story swiftly unfolds. As order on the ship collapses at the revelation, Hana and Barrens find out that hundreds of years ago, the Noah crash-landed on Earth, bringing with it amazing technology far beyond human understanding. But it also brought with it a disease that humanity has never been able to stop. A disease that leads to the mutated monster children. A disease that causes people to literally fall apart — Mincemeat. Everyone who isn’t killed in some way dies from this disease at some point. Some very young. Some very old. Some in the middle. Everyone.

To stop the Civil War that she and Barrens unwittingly helped begin, Hana uses her special research program, which has now become a monstrous AI through its contact with the alien technology, to help ISec regain control. Unfortunately for Hana, the disease has decided it’s her time to go, and even as her AI, which takes on a loving personality of its own, tries to save her, her body eventually fails. But not before she helps restore the regime she accidentally derailed.

Not before she uncovers the final secret: that the human beings on the ship and their monstrous offspring are literally just a crew, meant to keep the ship going until it reaches the chosen new Earth. The real survivors are a group of human beings in stasis, the last humans not infected by the disease slowly destroying them all. Everyone else will be killed as soon as the real survivors are safe.

And not before enough of herself becomes one with ship’s systems, thanks to her AI, for her to live on as a literal ghost in the machine. Or, perhaps, somewhat of a God.

The End.

_____

My Take

So, my plot synopsis probably captured about 5% of the actual plot of the book. Yeah. This book is dense. Really dense. And really long. I have somewhat conflicted feelings about that, but it’s going to take me a while to really explain everything, so I’m going to start from the beginning and go from there.

I thought the beginning of the story was too drawn out. Starting at around 35% (according to my Kindle), the book finally started to pick up. The lead-in was too long for my tastes, and there were times when I was afraid it would never pick up, that all the book had to offer was a couple characters running programs and having sex (the romance angle was emphasized heavily, especially in the first half of the book). Thankfully, I didn’t give up, and after that point, I was thoroughly hooked.

Not that the first 35% is boring, per say. It’s filled with rich world-building (richer even than the world-building in The Waking Engine) and dizzying descriptions of fantastical sci-fi elements that I found incredibly interesting. But the stakes in the story didn’t become apparent fast enough. There was little escalation in the plot until it hit that 35% stride, and I started feeling the strain of a stagnate and repetitive plot sequence on my patience at around 20%. If I had to choose the worst aspect of reading The Forever Watch, it would be the long beginning.

Additionally, I felt that the descriptions of the technology were too thorough, so thorough that I got lost in them and skimmed many of them because it would have made no difference whether I read them or not — full understanding of science (even the sci-fi science) was beyond me. It occasionally made my head spin. My favorite descriptions were of the psychic abilities of the characters and their connections to one another and the future internet dubbed the Nth Web. Those were generally well done. It was mostly the descriptions of what Hana and the AI program were doing that really through me for a loop. Some of them were too scientific for my tastes. Too long. Too much of a deviation from the main plot.

On the other hand, what a world Ramirez built. I was impressed by Edison’s imagination in The Waking Engine, but the world of The Forever Watch blew me away. Everything about it, from the technology to the style of government to the psychic powers…everything was carefully thought out and fully described. There was no confusion about who could do what why, and information is continually revealed to the reader at a pace that makes it easy to digest. There are no massive info-dumps or overloads. Every aspect of the world makes sense — and I imagine writing the story that way was no easy task, considering the depth of Ramirez’s world-building.

Also, despite the slow beginning, the plot was excellent. I did guess the ending a while ahead of time — because I’ve seen that ending before — but it didn’t make the story any less enjoyable. One of the best things about the plot was the use of gray morality. There’s no black and white, heroes versus villains, or right versus wrong going on in this book. The somewhat science-based caste system and its mostly faceless leaders may strike you as the obvious “villain,” but as the plot becomes complex and more is revealed, the simplicity of that idea is destroyed. Then you really have to think about the situation. No simple answer is given.

Basically, this book was excellent but had a few structural flaws that lessened my enjoyment somewhat.

_____

Writing

First person, present tense. My favorite. Hooray! Worked very well here, too. If Ramirez had tried multiple POVs or an even somewhat omniscient or less limited narrator, this book would have probably been very confusing, simply because of how much complexity Ramirez built into the story as a whole. I imagine it would have turned out somewhat like The Waking Engine actually, a ton of great ideas with no real focus. Ramirez skillfully avoided that.

Some of the passages sounded downright poetic. Hard to make hard science and computer lingo sound poetic, but it was done very well here.

_____

Is It Worth Reading?

I wish I could give you a straightforward answer. I rated it pretty high, but I will be the first to admit this book isn’t for everyone. It’s got all the ideas of The Waking Engine with the organization of a textbook, the prose of a poet, and the scientific knowledge of a actual scientist (which the author is). It’s not an easy read or a short one. If you want some light beach reading or something, this is not what you are looking for. This book is for people seeking a deep, complex somewhat hard sci-fi novel with an ambiguous moral message.

_____

Rating

4/5 ( )