moski's Book Journey

i feel very blerghhhhh about this. i wanted to love it, it literally has almost all my most favorite ingredients: speculative near-future sci-fi, criss-crossing stories within stories, metatext, writers writing about writers, even SPACE TRAVEL, etc etc and so forth. but idk, somehow nothing ever clicked into place for me. the story, the characters, the tying together of everything, i just wasn’t interested or invested in any of it. i couldn’t immerse myself in a world so wholly unbelievable to me - and no, the unbelievable part wasn’t the robots or the space travel or the ai ghosts, it was the idea that people all over the world really truly fell in love with the book-within-this-book, zelu’s rusted robots. this is a problem that comes up when authors try to write about artists, writers, singers that become incredibly popular. if you’re going to show me the art that supposedly got them such fame and notoriety, that art better be damn good. and the excerpts we got of rusted robots were um… not that. and i love sci-fi!!! there were just too many unbelievable things in this book for me to vibe with it, and i’m willing to suspend disbelief but the way the book was picked up immediately and published and she got an insane advance, the way people recognized her on the street, the way she got emails from TWO different billionaires who pushed the story along without any active movement from our main character, which was not only not at all believable but also narratively boring. i’m curious to read more from this author, but this book was just such a let-down ://

i feel very blerghhhhh about this. i wanted to love it, it literally has almost all my most favorite ingredients: speculative near-future sci-fi, criss-crossing stories within stories, metatext, writers writing about writers, even SPACE TRAVEL, etc etc and so forth. but idk, somehow nothing ever clicked into place for me. the story, the characters, the tying together of everything, i just wasn’t interested or invested in any of it. i couldn’t immerse myself in a world so wholly unbelievable to me - and no, the unbelievable part wasn’t the robots or the space travel or the ai ghosts, it was the idea that people all over the world really truly fell in love with the book-within-this-book, zelu’s rusted robots. this is a problem that comes up when authors try to write about artists, writers, singers that become incredibly popular. if you’re going to show me the art that supposedly got them such fame and notoriety, that art better be damn good. and the excerpts we got of rusted robots were um… not that. and i love sci-fi!!! there were just too many unbelievable things in this book for me to vibe with it, and i’m willing to suspend disbelief but the way the book was picked up immediately and published and she got an insane advance, the way people recognized her on the street, the way she got emails from TWO different billionaires who pushed the story along without any active movement from our main character, which was not only not at all believable but also narratively boring. i’m curious to read more from this author, but this book was just such a let-down ://