Reviews and Comments

I wanted to like Tracer, and truthfully there's stuff there to like. Unfortunately, there's more to dislike.

First the good: The physicality of everything is great. The parkour, the hand-to-hand combat, the action - it was all brilliant. I could feel my body wanting to move along with Riley, the main character, who's a runner on a spin gravity space station. Tracer made me want to start doing parkour again. Sure, everyone was made of iron and repeatedly survived injuries that should have crippled them right away, but I'll just chalk it up to pulp sensibilites. The same goes with the flat characters. If you're writing an action story, archetypes will work just fine.

However, there's the bad. The plot was an avalanche of stupid, straight out of your standard action video game. The antagonists' plans were sheer insanity, and not even believable insanity. The physics were bizarre - even though the novel seemed to be aiming for semi-hard science, I'm pretty certain that unless my maths is completely off, a major plot point involving the spinning of a space station would not work as described. The society just felt weird for a post apocalyptic story.

For me, the whole of Tracer just didn't gel. It really felt like a video game - a set of good action scenes, trapped in a D-grade plot we're supposed to take seriously. Video games are supposed to have plots that are about the end of the world, but Tracer would have worked better just as a high-octane crime story on a chaotic space station.

Depth had an idea that really interested me, but sadly enough, fell prey to two problems that happen to annoy me personally. One is setting-related, the other technical (there's also a third one that could be said to be a thematic misunderstanding, but it's really minor). Mostly the problems stem from reading the novel as a semi-hard sci-fi story, so they won't be annoyances for everyone.

First: the setting feels terribly unbelievable. I kept trying to think about how the state of the world got to how it was, and constantly felt that it would require a catastrophe greater than the story implied. The sea level rise seemed to require that all the ice in the icecaps was gone, in which case I'd think the refugee crisis would be unimaginable and it would be unlikely that any present society would be left standing, and still the book talks casually of USA and EU, even if the former is a Jesusland rump of its former self. This felt lazy, somehow; the book was supposed to be science fiction, but the science felt really soft.

The second problem was that everything related to the actual experience of water seemed off. Water is presented as more of a personal monster, something you cannot hope to swim in or survive touching because of 'currents'. Again, this felt lazy, like the author just wanted to play 'the floor is lava' in an entire city. In the couple of underwater scenes there actually are, the experience of being underwater felt somehow wrong as well. I kept wondering about light and visibility and other stuff that comes into play; in a drowned city, your visibility would probably be something like 10 metres, maximum, especially if the currents keep moving stuff. I haven't done a lot of scuba diving, but still it felt like there was no consistent logic on how the water behaved.

(The third nit-pick is thematic: this book breaks the noir rule of 'nobody gets what they want, but everybody gets what they deserve', in a rather unsatisfying way. To say more would be a spoiler.)

It wasn't all bad - I didn't want to hurl it against the wall or anything, and I liked the idea of a noir story where essentially all the character genders were flipped. Nevertheless, I cannot particularily recommend it.