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A review by trike
Serengeti by J. B. Rockwell
1.0
There’s an old joke that goes, “The food here is terrible! And the portions are too small!”
Yeah, that.
This is basically Wall-E on a sentient spaceship. It is neither fish nor fowl, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it starts off as a rip-roaring Space Opera and then becomes an extended napfest as the titular AI goes to sleep and wakes up every few years. No idea what the point of that was, and the promises made in the first half are not kept in the second. Very dissatisfying. Hence the portions.
I was already struggling with the space battle parts, because the crew was ridiculously unprofessional and overly emo, so when they’re shunted offstage in favor of the little robot it was no big loss. But it makes me wonder why so much time was spent on them. The AIs run everything, making the humans superfluous supercargo. Why are they even on board? Serengeti tolerates them the way I tolerate my Chihuahua. He adds nothing to my life other than biting me, pooping on the floor and big vet bills. (I didn’t choose him, he was foisted upon me over my objections, but I don’t discard pets that are annoyingly inconvenient.) I certainly wouldn’t take him into battle with me, because he’d be worse than useless: he’d be a distraction that would get me killed. Same with the crew on this ship.
This is not well thought-out.
The robots are problematic, too. Tig (Wall-E) cannibalizes parts of the ship to build a girlfriend, Tilly. They later build another bot that they treat like a daughter. But if “building a bot” equates to parent/child then Tig and Tilly are... ew, ick. And it *is* a simplistic heterosexual relationship, something that is stressed over and over. Why? Why would robots fall into this biological, social paradigm? Why assign gender to them at all?
I looked at the author page here on Goodreads and the Twitter she links to is a repulsively racist pro-Trump MAGA rant. So that answers why the robots have a nuclear family against all reason, I guess. See for yourself: https://mobile.twitter.com/Rockwell_JB
Yeah, that.
This is basically Wall-E on a sentient spaceship. It is neither fish nor fowl, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it starts off as a rip-roaring Space Opera and then becomes an extended napfest as the titular AI goes to sleep and wakes up every few years. No idea what the point of that was, and the promises made in the first half are not kept in the second. Very dissatisfying. Hence the portions.
I was already struggling with the space battle parts, because the crew was ridiculously unprofessional and overly emo, so when they’re shunted offstage in favor of the little robot it was no big loss. But it makes me wonder why so much time was spent on them. The AIs run everything, making the humans superfluous supercargo. Why are they even on board? Serengeti tolerates them the way I tolerate my Chihuahua. He adds nothing to my life other than biting me, pooping on the floor and big vet bills. (I didn’t choose him, he was foisted upon me over my objections, but I don’t discard pets that are annoyingly inconvenient.) I certainly wouldn’t take him into battle with me, because he’d be worse than useless: he’d be a distraction that would get me killed. Same with the crew on this ship.
This is not well thought-out.
The robots are problematic, too. Tig (Wall-E) cannibalizes parts of the ship to build a girlfriend, Tilly. They later build another bot that they treat like a daughter. But if “building a bot” equates to parent/child then Tig and Tilly are... ew, ick. And it *is* a simplistic heterosexual relationship, something that is stressed over and over. Why? Why would robots fall into this biological, social paradigm? Why assign gender to them at all?
I looked at the author page here on Goodreads and the Twitter she links to is a repulsively racist pro-Trump MAGA rant. So that answers why the robots have a nuclear family against all reason, I guess. See for yourself: https://mobile.twitter.com/Rockwell_JB