NetGalley is a great way to find new authors and books, most of which I never see in our library. The premise is simple exchange: I get access to advance electronic copies of books and promise to review each one. Since I got my tablet with Kindle application it’s easy to access and read the books (easier than with my Nook) and I’ve been able to meet my commitment.
This is a two-sided bargain. I must actually read and finish the book to review it. And books from NetGalley are just like ones from the library; some are excellent, most are OK and a few are stinkers.
Galactic Legend of Life and Death uses a huge backstory, the very nature of life and death, and the long term survival of the human race. The world building premise was grand: Humans are invited to join the Alliance of Intelligent Clusters, but there is a catch We have only so long to prove we are intelligent and the proof must come from a demonstrable contribution to the overall universe knowledge. You can see this could be an exciting idea for a novel!
Unfortunately authors Boian and Dora Alexandrov added in multitudes of ideas: Black holes that survive from one Big Bang to another, the endless search for immortality or the cessation of life altogether, the fight for survival on a strange world, a galactic lab where every species has its own planet and access to develop ideas and gain its intelligence license, beings comprised of pure energy, beings that live in stars, a nearly omnipresent intelligence/artificer called Cor, Wandering Dowgens who are reborn after each Big Bang and seek out intelligence, instantaneous travel, ability to ask to Cor to make any food, build any structure, alter the world, to… You get the idea. It is overwhelming. I felt bludgeoned.
I would like to reread this novel after a seriously empowered editor honed it to one story, or even a novel with three or four stories. This book has so many excellent ideas it’s as if the authors couldn’t decide which to use, so threw the all into the pot and we ended up with a book that zooms from idea to idea, plot to plot, strange planet to far galaxy to different universes and in the process forgot about people.
Boian and Dora Alexandrov did not develop the characters well. I believe they could have done a better job on the people, made the settings even better had they selected just one main plot with a (small) subplot or two. As it was we had so many words and ideas and quests and desires that it was a giant stew.
I read this on the Kindle app which had about 800 screen/pages and each page was around 400 words. That’s 320,000, far too many. Until Fanagor got to the lab and found out about the license imperative, I thought a good editor would cross out every other sentence, then cut out two thirds of the adjectives and we’d have a good story. But a better idea would be to slim the novel down to a manageable number of ideas and make each one live.
The Alliance of Intelligent Clusters, the Lab, the three Cluster types, the need for an intelligence license are great ideas that could make a wonderful science fiction novel. Save the Tillda black hole, Tillda’s “children”, the book containing the Galactic Legend of Life and Death and the Wandering Dowgens for other novels.
Overall, had I not gotten this through NetGalley and owed a read and review, I’d have stopped about page 20. At that point the sheer number of words and absence of any use for those words felt exhausting. The novel got much better and more interesting further on but I cannot give it more than 3 stars.
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