God’s War, by Kameron Hurley

14 Jun 2011

On Niall Harrison’s recommendation I picked up Hurley’s God’s War and read it over the weekend. As a paid up member of the Post-Cyberpunk clade, it’s a solid piece of work. Violent, entertaining outcasts are jerked around by the powerful, people are killed, scores are settled, bad-assery is done. The world-building is vivid, if not entirely consistent. Its treatment of gender is interesting, and reasonably novel, and it depicts the issues of its two Muslim civilizations as being orthogonal to the fact that they’re Muslim. It’s even well paced.

It isn’t without its flaws, of course. The writing could be better, especially in the neologisms department, and the world-building suffers quite a lot from tech search and replace issue, subbing in ‘bug’ for any number of other terms just to make things fit with the aesthetic, without ever bothering to think of whether these substitutions actually make sense. The vehicles, in particular, suffer from both the neologism issue (‘bakkie’??) and from being powered by and constructed from bug-encrusted handwavium (this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if they weren’t so prominent and often mentioned). The world-building is big on bold, vague strokes and light on telling details, and the visual description could use some real work. Also, for being so many thousands of years into the future, it’s all a bit old-fashioned.

EDIT: Niall points out in comments below that bakkie is South African slang for a pickup truck. So I apologize for that (although it still sounds a bit silly to American ears), but this highlights the visual description issues that I mention. Nowhere that I noticed was a bakkie described in enough detail for me to get that it was anything other than a wheeled vehicle (running on bug spit and unicorn farts).

END EDIT

None of these things are fatal flaws, and are easily overlooked, especially since this is the author’s debut. If you like Richard Morgan (particularly the second two Kovacs books), you’re quite likely to enjoy God’s War.

That said, the more of these I read, the more I wonder why people still bother to write them.

To get at why, I am going to have to delve into spoiler territory, and possibly into some uniquely personal aesthetic preferences, so go read it if you haven’t. It’s only a few bucks online. I’ll write another post detailing why I say that tomorrow, once I’ve had some more time to chew over my objections.