Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel

I read the first book from the Themis Files trilogy a while back, and I might’ve said (or I might not) that it’s one of the writing styles you either get on with … or you don’t.

The book picks up ten years after Sleeping Giants left off; the giant robot left by an alien race, and commandeered by a collective of Earth’s scientists and the military, has become something of a global celebrity (parades, tours, that kind of thing …), though very little is known about the race that created of this.

And this lack of knowledge becomes a bit of a stumbling block when another robot appears in the middle of London, and lays waste to half the city within the space of a minute. And from then on, it just gets worse: twelve more giant robots materialise in the most densely populated cities on the planet, while key members of the planetary defence force struggle to mount a response …

Like Book #1, Waking Gods is told through a series of reports, conversations, email messages between two (sometimes three – which can get confusing people), news broadcasts, even chatroom messages. This sometimes makes it hard work to keep track of what’s going on, but it does make it feel as though you’re right in the thick of it with the characters. There are no descriptions of surroundings, no omniscient viewpoint to tell you how the characters are feeling; but that doesn’t seem to make it any less of a great read. Some of the dialogue comes across as unrealistic because every so often, the reader needs something explaining that you character wouldn’t take time to do if the world was coming to an end.

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Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

This is an odd one, and when I started I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it. The book’s written as a collection of interviews, messages and conversations in Chinese restaurants. It begins with the discovery of an ancient alien weapon that’s been disassembled and buried in different locations across the globe. From discovery, we move quickly to assembly, but the trouble starts when the scientists and military try to make it work. …

Now, I’ve read a couple of books like this, and I haven’t always enjoyed them. Unless you can do it well, then comes across as a bit of a cop-out. Unless you can do it well, then it gets pretty tedious very quickly.

Luckily, the writer pretty much nails it. The whole book is dialogue basically, and it’s written so well that the scenes are set, the relationships defined and the suspense is … er … suspensed, all through these snippets of conversation. The characters are mostly believable, though I did feel that sometimes their behaviour came out of the blue, which demonstrates the problem with this kind of writing: because you’re getting parts of the story, you get the feeling that something’s developing in the background you might be missing. For example, I didn’t pick up that one one player had built such strong feelings for another he’d be driven to do something hideously out of character.

Still, the whole book shows great imagination and attention to detail, which makes it, like all good speculative fiction, strangely believable. A great combination of a quick read and an intensely readable page turner.