SF Signal: Review - The Godwhale, by T.J. Bass

Review - The Godwhale, by T.J. Bass

MY RATING:
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A cyborg plankton harvester helps the rebel Benthics in their fight against the continent spanning Hive cities.
PROS: Interesting setting.
CONS: Dry writing style, jumps in the story with little warning, uninteresting characters.
BOTTOM LINE: An interesting premise that doesn't live up to expectations.

MY REVIEW:
My feelings toward this book are similar to those expressed by John. The only difference being I didn't slip into skim mode to finish it. The book had a very odd feel to it. Sort of a cross between Logan's Run and the old Paranoia RPG. The characters just didn't seem real or even believable to me and it felt like it was written in the 70's. Another annoying thing was the propensity for the time frame to change in a short amount of time, sometimes between sentences. It was odd. In fact, the entire story was just plain, well, felt 'odd' for lack of a better term.

I do like the idea of a struggle between a closed, tightly-controlled, hive-like society that lives underground and a free, but less advanced, society that lives outside the cities. This story, however, felt like a pop-culture take on that conflict, as if Bass had given about 15 minutes of thought to it and then wrote it down. I'm really not sure why this was even nominated. Was SF really, really bad in '74? Even given that, the story was (barely) interesting enough to keep me going, although I had to force myself to read the last 50 or so pages. For that reason, I couldn't give it 3 stars and had to knock it down to 2.5. I wanted more of everything in the story. What I got felt like an outline to a more interesting story that wasn't written.