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A review by romireads
The Gaia Effect by Claire Buss
4.0
When I read the blurb for the first time, I got huge Brave New World (because of the pregnancies) and Nineteen-Eightyfour (because of the whole big Corporation watching over you from cradle to grave, brrr) vibes. It really made me curious about the book and hope that it wouldn’t be a far cry from those huge works of dystopian literature. And luckily, it wasn’t! Where I normally have a hard time reading any science fiction novel, I didn’t with The Gaia Effect. Not at all. It was both futuristic AND believable!
Just like the day of today, a big part of the daily news gets spread via a kind of social medium. It took me some time to figure out how the chatnames worked, but when I finally did (they were abbreviations for the character’s and corporation’s names) I thought it was a lovely addition to the story! You really get to see how social media works and what’s good about it, but also what’s wrong about it. The wrong part about it is all the gossip and the inciting messages which, of course, made it more exciting for me, as a the reader. Although I was really glad I could read it, safe and sound, on the couch in my 2017 home. (Things got nasty, real quick).
At the same time I found it hard to really bond with the main characters somehow, and I couldn’t really get a good grip on how this futuristic world looked like. I think I missed discriptions of the surroundings and the characters were a bit too sketchy, in my opinion. All this made me not care that much about the horrible events in the book, although I knew they were absolutely horrific!
All in all, I loved the cautionary tale that The Gaia Effect is. On some days I could really cry about what we’re all doing to this beautiful Earth we borrowed and The Gaia Effect shows one possible outcome. And I can tell ya, it’s not a pretty one.
3.5/5 ★
*I received an ebook copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*/5!
Just like the day of today, a big part of the daily news gets spread via a kind of social medium. It took me some time to figure out how the chatnames worked, but when I finally did (they were abbreviations for the character’s and corporation’s names) I thought it was a lovely addition to the story! You really get to see how social media works and what’s good about it, but also what’s wrong about it. The wrong part about it is all the gossip and the inciting messages which, of course, made it more exciting for me, as a the reader. Although I was really glad I could read it, safe and sound, on the couch in my 2017 home. (Things got nasty, real quick).
At the same time I found it hard to really bond with the main characters somehow, and I couldn’t really get a good grip on how this futuristic world looked like. I think I missed discriptions of the surroundings and the characters were a bit too sketchy, in my opinion. All this made me not care that much about the horrible events in the book, although I knew they were absolutely horrific!
All in all, I loved the cautionary tale that The Gaia Effect is. On some days I could really cry about what we’re all doing to this beautiful Earth we borrowed and The Gaia Effect shows one possible outcome. And I can tell ya, it’s not a pretty one.
3.5/5 ★
*I received an ebook copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*/5!