Stringers by Chris Panatier

​It’s been tricky finding science fiction to my liking. This book is a shining example of that. While traditionally I do strive for a certain degree of objectivity in my reviews, first and foremost they are meant to represent a personal reading experience, and thus…while this technically might be a perfectly good sci-fi adventure, it really, really didn’t work for me.
Objectively speaking, it has the mad manic energy of a contemporary space romp and the intricately convoluted intrigue of a space opera and the wildly contrived quirk of “look how quirky we are, we’re going to do footnotes, copious amounts of footnotes that’ll make it look like the protagonist might be talking to himself, but is he, really”. And that might be enough for some readers. It wasn’t enough for this one.
Random facts about the animal kingdom (which the protagonist of this novel is loaded with), sure, yeah. The rest…no, thank you.
I did try, I really did. But it was just so hyper, so busy, so over the top, that it managed to leave me completely indifferent. Most of the time it was just turning pages. Sometimes there were some fun things occurring on those pages, but honestly, I don’t think I can even do an accurate plot summary for this and that’s after 400 pages.
For some reason the publisher, Angry Robot, has decided that 400 is a proper length for a science fiction novel and that’s all they do. Personally, I believe that to be much too long, not to mention peculiarly inflexible. Although far be it for me to argue with a robot. It was certainly much too long for this novel, even though technically about 6% of it is taken up by footnotes, all those freaking footnotes.
It’s an inventive novel, it might even be clever, although in that “look how clever I am” way, but it’s exhausting and really kind of hyper, like hyped up on its own energy. For me, contrived cleverness and animal trivia aside, it barely amused and mostly ended up being a waste of time.
It was easy to tell the sort of book this was meant to be…a wacky, whimsical, humorous space adventure that gets a lot of mileage out of a jar of pickles, it just didn’t quite get there.
It stands to mention…I don’t normally like space operas, and I am particular about my science fiction, so my opinion might very well be a minority one and must be considered as such. Which is to say, user mileage may vary. Thanks Netgalley.