A review by lachese
Axis by Robert Charles Wilson
3.0
Spin was a big piece of silky rich chocolate ganache cake. Axis is a dollar store fruit cake with too much mushed together, and none of it working cohesively. It feels like a completely different genre than Spin. As a standalone novel, it would be mostly fine: an adventure novel with a "get the ring to Mordor" type storyline. The characters were not particularly relatable or well developed, and due to that I internally eye-rolled at a few parts. Some characters and organizations were clearly added for tension, but then disappeared halfway through the book, making their beginning presence completely pointless. Unlike Spin, in which every sentence, every single word was a finely crafted work of art, very little in this book had that cohesive beauty.
The ending of the book felt rushed, like the author just wanted to get the story over with to get to the "good stuff." Perhaps that was the entire point of this book. Perhaps that's why it wasn't written to the same quality as Spin, which was clearly a well developed labor of love. This book comes off as a quickly written bridge between Spin and Vortex (book 3). Perhaps that's all it is.
The ending of the book felt rushed, like the author just wanted to get the story over with to get to the "good stuff." Perhaps that was the entire point of this book. Perhaps that's why it wasn't written to the same quality as Spin, which was clearly a well developed labor of love. This book comes off as a quickly written bridge between Spin and Vortex (book 3). Perhaps that's all it is.