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A review by trike
Revolution World by Katy Stauber
3.0
This is a tough one to review. The problem is that the book is sort of neither here nor there.
It's satirical, but not quite satirical enough. It's very funny in spots (the reveal with the dogs made me laugh out loud), but the tone is uneven. There are a lot of interesting ideas in it, but it feels slight. It's well-written for the most part, but there are weird lapses in proofreading and editing, such as when pronouns switch genders.
As a first effort, I quite liked it. I'm not a fan of the whole Texan state of mind thing, even if politically I don't think there's much here that most Americans disagree with. No matter which part of the political spectrum you find yourself in, we pretty much all agree that the government in general and Congress in particular is doing a pretty bad job.
There are some things I didn't think needed to be in the story since there wasn't a big rationale for them. The biggest one was why the people of Omertà were vampires. They aren't traditional vampires, of course, but rather science fictional ones, but if there was an underlying point to that other than to hook it into the whole biopunk thing, I missed it. If Staub had used them to make a point about Canadian health care versus American health care, I could see their inclusion, but that aspect was left alone. And really, any number of medical conditions could be a stand-in to highlight those differences.
Given all the anti-government rhetoric in the story, I'm actually kind of surprised health care wasn't underscored more. After all, late in the book she comes down pretty definitively against torture of suspected terrorists (or any enemies of the state, really) along with programs like Extraordinary Rendition, even if she does handle them humorously. Which I applaud, don't get me wrong -- these are difficult subjects to handle without going off on a screed, and even here she gets a little ranty for a couple pages. I happen to agree with her that torture is bad, and seeing as how this book was written probably sometime in 2010-2011, it's still relevant here in early 2015 with the recent US government report detailing how none of the torture the US engaged in actually achieved the result of garnering actionable intelligence. That's what those in the know have been saying all along, so it's a solid win for Staub here.
The problem is, at the same time she's undercutting that whole ultrapatriotic "let's do things the way Jack Bauer does it in the TV series 24" stuff, she's substituting the Libertarian-slash-Tea Party ethos for it, which we've seen is also a failed method for doing things. Witness uninspected Texas refineries exploding to see the ultimate outcome of those sorts of policies.
So on the one hand I liked the book, it had funny parts, but other aspects left me wanting a second rewrite to flesh some aspects out and punch up the humor. I'm not cool with Monsanto, either, nor the collusion between corporations and the government, but simply renaming them "Malsanto" and having DARPA be the jackbooted thugs of the piece was a bit too on the nose.
But it's an easy read and there are enough good bits to hold your interest.
It's satirical, but not quite satirical enough. It's very funny in spots (the reveal with the dogs made me laugh out loud), but the tone is uneven. There are a lot of interesting ideas in it, but it feels slight. It's well-written for the most part, but there are weird lapses in proofreading and editing, such as when pronouns switch genders.
As a first effort, I quite liked it. I'm not a fan of the whole Texan state of mind thing, even if politically I don't think there's much here that most Americans disagree with. No matter which part of the political spectrum you find yourself in, we pretty much all agree that the government in general and Congress in particular is doing a pretty bad job.
There are some things I didn't think needed to be in the story since there wasn't a big rationale for them. The biggest one was why the people of Omertà were vampires. They aren't traditional vampires, of course, but rather science fictional ones, but if there was an underlying point to that other than to hook it into the whole biopunk thing, I missed it. If Staub had used them to make a point about Canadian health care versus American health care, I could see their inclusion, but that aspect was left alone. And really, any number of medical conditions could be a stand-in to highlight those differences.
Given all the anti-government rhetoric in the story, I'm actually kind of surprised health care wasn't underscored more. After all, late in the book she comes down pretty definitively against torture of suspected terrorists (or any enemies of the state, really) along with programs like Extraordinary Rendition, even if she does handle them humorously. Which I applaud, don't get me wrong -- these are difficult subjects to handle without going off on a screed, and even here she gets a little ranty for a couple pages. I happen to agree with her that torture is bad, and seeing as how this book was written probably sometime in 2010-2011, it's still relevant here in early 2015 with the recent US government report detailing how none of the torture the US engaged in actually achieved the result of garnering actionable intelligence. That's what those in the know have been saying all along, so it's a solid win for Staub here.
The problem is, at the same time she's undercutting that whole ultrapatriotic "let's do things the way Jack Bauer does it in the TV series 24" stuff, she's substituting the Libertarian-slash-Tea Party ethos for it, which we've seen is also a failed method for doing things. Witness uninspected Texas refineries exploding to see the ultimate outcome of those sorts of policies.
So on the one hand I liked the book, it had funny parts, but other aspects left me wanting a second rewrite to flesh some aspects out and punch up the humor. I'm not cool with Monsanto, either, nor the collusion between corporations and the government, but simply renaming them "Malsanto" and having DARPA be the jackbooted thugs of the piece was a bit too on the nose.
But it's an easy read and there are enough good bits to hold your interest.