js_thrill | Far From The Light of Heaven (Tade Thompson) (Reply)

I picked this up after reading Rosewater, and I think I’m in a position to say that I generally expect I will like Tade Thompson’s writing, but that Rosewater was more my thing than Far From the Light of Heaven wound up being.

The characters got slightly shorter shrift here, and there was less conveyance of the world-building than I would have liked (I suspect that the world is thoroughly built, from Thompson’s end, I just wanted to have better breadcrumbs of, say, what the lambers were, and the intergalactic politics, etc.). The story is simultaneously trying to be a locked room mystery on this space ship, and paint the world of intergalactic politics where there are wormhole bridges and a couple of nascent colonies, and it can't serve both masters at the same time.

Thompson apparently really likes to bounce around perspectives when writing (in Rosewater it was jumping back and forth in time, here it is switching who we are focused on) and I think it would serve the story well to ratchet that tendency back a bit. I noted in my review of The Loop that I don’t particularly value gore; it is good that I am not bothered by it, though, as Thompson does not shy away from gore in his writing.

I liked the character Shell, I liked the character Fin. I liked Servo from what we met of him, but would have appreciated more depth. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joké, who was written a bit too much as a sort of manic pixie dream girl (imo).

Overall, though, I found it a pretty engaging book and found myself eager to finish it.