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The Darwin Elevator Dire Earth Cycle Jason M Hough Books

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The Darwin Elevator Dire Earth Cycle Jason M Hough Books

The Darwin Elevator, the new sci-fi novel by first-time author Jason Hough, is full of cool science, mysterious alien artifacts, intense action, and plenty of surprises. In a near-future earth, an alien ship arrives in Earth orbit and extends a line anchored in Darwin, Australia, creating a space elevator. Scientific and economic progress are given a brief boost, as we finally gain the ability to move resources into orbit inexpensively. The good fortune is short-lived, however, as a few short years later another alien ship arrives, bringing with it a plague that renders all of Earth, except for a few square miles around Darwin, uninhabitable. Humanity is divided between residents of Darwin and the Orbitals, the few who live in space stations along the elevator.

Skyler, one of a tiny percentage of humans immune to the plague, is captain of a scavenger ship. He and his crew travel around the world gathering useful materials for use by Darwin's residents and the Orbitals, while they fight off the subhumans, people who have succumbed to the plague. This precarious balance between the Orbitals and the Earth-bound humans, sustained by scavenging, desalinization of ocean water, and space-station-based agriculture, becomes more and more strained, to the point of armed conflict. Skyler is caught in the middle.

Part of me acknowledges that The Darwin Elevator is not high-brow literature, and it may not even be satisfying to fans of pure, hard sci-fi. But in my mind, Hough writes well and provides exactly what this sort of novel calls for: likable but flawed heroes you can root for (male and female), really bad bad guys, cool speculative science, engaging action, and aliens waiting offstage, hopefully to make an appearance in later volumes.

Speaking of later volumes, The Darwin Elevator is book one of three in the Dire Earth Sequence. I like the fact that Hough is releasing the three books in rapid succession. I, for one, am eager to start reading book two!

Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!


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The Darwin Elevator Dire Earth Cycle Jason M Hough Books Reviews

I'm genuinely trying to think of good things to say about this novel, but I'm not doing very well. At one point, a character in an important position jokingly asks to be adressed as "your excellence" and the protagonist is uncertain if he means it. At another, the protagonist's obese friend threatens to hunt him down and sit on him. Those two lines, and one or two others that I struggle to remember, amused me for a moment. In the best part of the novel, the protagonist spends two or three pages pretending to be an idiot. This scene was amusingly written, and a welcome respite from the rest of the novel where he genuinely is an idiot.

I suppose the premise has some promise, but the space elevator, as well as the totally-not-zombie infection and Skyler's immunity to it, all manage to be almost entirely irrelevant to the story. They serve as a fancy backdrop, providing an illusion of science fiction-y wonder and postapocalyptic urgency to a plot that revolves around one dimensional characters engaged in a petty and uninteresting power struggle.

The main antagonist (the only character I have anything to say about) has all of the petty character traits designed to make a villain not just evil, but unlikable. He confiscates an entirely unimportant character's novel for no reason other than to screw with him (it's War and Peace. He's never heard of it, but "likes half of it"). Consensual sex bores him (specifically because it's consensual). All of his (idenitcal, faceless, nameless) soldiers seem to share these personality traits (particularly the obsession with abusing women), and like him they spend any of their screentime demonstrating it. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the megalomaniacal Bond-villain plan to back it up, although of course he's megalomaniacal. He isn't menacing, or threatening, or charismatic, or intelligent, only annoying.

The writing is uniformly lazy. At one point a character decides that he will give a speech to the locals in a bar "after another drink" and then immediately (literally the next sentence) tells his companion that they should get out of the bar to discuss business. "Shell shocked" is routinely misused to mean "stunned". Many of the things that happen in the novel could have just been torn out of it and you wouldn't notice anything was missing. This includes entire plot-arcs (like when the protagonist is isolated, far from civilization, and has to fight his way back. He doesn't change or learn anything during the trip. The delay serves no purpose) as well as a ton of minor events, like the foreshadowing of ambushes that never happen or somebody losing their weapon in a dramatic fashion only to walk back and retrieve it on the next page rather than having to do without it during anything important. The plot is nonsensical. A crucial plot point (revealed too early to be a spoiler) is a scientist's "brilliant theory" that because two alien-engineered events (the construction of a space elevator and a world wide pandemic) happened twelve years apart, any third alien-engineered event will probably happen on some kind of schedule related to the first two. Why? Because, well, twelve years (11.70 years actually, because that's how scientists talk) between two events is, like, a specific amount of time! It must mean something!

I'm always happy to cut a debut novel a little slack, and to be perfectly fair The Darwin Elevatpr doesn't often dip into being actively bad. With the notable exceptions of the antagonist and the (mind numbingly stupid) plot point mentioned above, all of its individual flaws could've very well existed in a much better novel. It's the complete absence of redeeming qualities that doom it.
The Darwin Elevator, the new sci-fi novel by first-time author Jason Hough, is full of cool science, mysterious alien artifacts, intense action, and plenty of surprises. In a near-future earth, an alien ship arrives in Earth orbit and extends a line anchored in Darwin, Australia, creating a space elevator. Scientific and economic progress are given a brief boost, as we finally gain the ability to move resources into orbit inexpensively. The good fortune is short-lived, however, as a few short years later another alien ship arrives, bringing with it a plague that renders all of Earth, except for a few square miles around Darwin, uninhabitable. Humanity is divided between residents of Darwin and the Orbitals, the few who live in space stations along the elevator.

Skyler, one of a tiny percentage of humans immune to the plague, is captain of a scavenger ship. He and his crew travel around the world gathering useful materials for use by Darwin's residents and the Orbitals, while they fight off the subhumans, people who have succumbed to the plague. This precarious balance between the Orbitals and the Earth-bound humans, sustained by scavenging, desalinization of ocean water, and space-station-based agriculture, becomes more and more strained, to the point of armed conflict. Skyler is caught in the middle.

Part of me acknowledges that The Darwin Elevator is not high-brow literature, and it may not even be satisfying to fans of pure, hard sci-fi. But in my mind, Hough writes well and provides exactly what this sort of novel calls for likable but flawed heroes you can root for (male and female), really bad bad guys, cool speculative science, engaging action, and aliens waiting offstage, hopefully to make an appearance in later volumes.

Speaking of later volumes, The Darwin Elevator is book one of three in the Dire Earth Sequence. I like the fact that Hough is releasing the three books in rapid succession. I, for one, am eager to start reading book two!

Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!