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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9809643" data-attributes="member: 18">I must sadly kinda disrecommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Saturation Point.It's the only book of his I've read that I would say was actually "not good". Not like "average" or "mediocre", but like, not worth your time. And it's not even long!It's sad because the fundamental concept of the book is pretty strong - in a super-heated post-climate change Earth, instead of the equator becoming arid, it's become ultra-humid, and supercharged jungle has grown into a relatively rapidly-expanding "Zone" which covers the equator and is perhaps still expanding. This area is totally impossible for humans or larger mammals to live in, because the combination of temperature and humidity puts the "wet bulb" temperature above what is survivable  - i.e. sweating etc. doesn't dump enough heat to keep you from cooking your own proteins and dying. Yet a corporate expedition is sent there to find out about something that's going on there. The rest of the world is all work-from-home perpetual pandemic conditions stuff, it seems.I'll use some spoiler tags on big plot things but... I don't really respect the book enough to feel like it deserves them.Initially, and predictably, the book is basically Aliens meets Heart of Darkness. In fact you could summarize the whole thing that way, except it would be far too kind. It's beneath even most imitators of those two. Tchaikovsky somewhat inexplicably but repeatedly has the characters reference Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky but there is absolutely zero of that vibe. Like, none. Nothing genuinely mysterious or full of wonder happens in the entire damn book, which may be a first for Tchaikovsky! And when I say repeatedly, I mean at least ten times, both directly and indirectly, including most eye-roll-inducingly, a character who cannot possibly have read that book, probably couldn't even have heard of it, crowbar'ing the phrase "roadside picnic" into a sentence like they had to fulfil an advertising contract!We get a cast of characters, but colourful and memorable they are not. Our point-of-view character is a wishy-washy and not very sharp scientist. Now, Tchaikovsky has actually written some pretty good characters who were slightly dim or not very heroic, but this ain't one of those, Dr Marx is totally bloody useless at all times, barely ever more than a passive observer and victim of circumstance. Very occasionally she says something so stupid it makes her situation worse I guess, but usually the other characters just shrug it off. She actively avoids being involved in anything interesting, even when it's relevant to her skillset and she's asked to be involved! She's an anti-hero in a novel sense, of like, not wanting do anything except talk smack. It's not a good sense though, especially not in a short, dramatic novel. The most memorable character is probably the corporate guy in charge, but even he's basically just a generic "excessively smiling white male CIA guy" from a movie.Then we have the main plot, which takes up the majority of the book. It doesn't really go anywhere. [ISPOILER]The cast a picked off. Wow what a surprise, I never saw that coming. Late on, too late to matter or be interesting, a couple of people appear to be killed but aren't (another generic trope from this sort of thing) and come back. Eventually the bad guy's lair is reached, but nothing about is interesting or compelling. He makes a big fuss about how the fans are blowing hot air to the upper levels, but like, obviously that's because they're cooling computers/3D printers etc. downstairs, as characters have suggested might the the case. And that's exactly what's happening. Wow, what a mystery! And then the Colonel Kurtz figure turns out to not be alive! What a surprise that you'd almost certainly worked out like, quite early in the book. And none of the characters, in this world where it's immediately established that video and voice are trivial to fake, thinks "Hmmm maybe this is a setup". And it's not even plausible as a setup, because of the insane cost/gain ratio, but we'll get back to that.[/ISPOILER]Characters in this novel, rather unlike a lot of his works, just don't behave like humans. [ISPOILER]When half the expedition dies mysteriously on day 1, everyone just sort of shrugs about it! Like what the naughty word man? There's no way they wouldn't have immediately called for backup at the very least, and they can't really explain why they don't, or why they keep going. And this whole thing keeps going on - barely any of the characters are remotely believable in their actual behaviour (as opposed to their described personalities and backstories). There's a moment later one when everyone wants to stay to "finish the story", and it's like, absolutely naughty word off, they would not want that when so many are dead. The mission plan also makes no real sense, they were relying on a bunch of low-odds things happening. All the antagonists had to do in order to stop the mission from succeeding was... nothing. If they'd just stayed away and waited for the expedition to get bored and run out of resources. They want this one character for totally implausible reasons, but they could easily have kidnapped her.[/ISPOILER]Then we have how the book is written. It's written as if it's a bunch of voice-recordings made by the main character, of her talking to others, listening to conversations on the radio, or just narrating. It's pretty annoying. It's not compelling or involving. It's not a good way to write an entire goddamn book, even a short one, or at least if you don't have an insanely good hook. And what's particularly bad is, you could have done this quite effectively as a radio play, or a book specifically for Audible or the like, but instead, it's written to be read, not written to be read out. So you lose the benefit you could have gained there.Finally we have the denouement of the story, the big reveal, what the book was all about. And this where it could have saved itself, many books that were kind of bleh manages to reach good or even great with their big reveal, but instead, it absolutely doubles-down on being forgettable nonsense! [ISPOILER]Turns out that there's this secret race of people genetically engineered to be able to be able to survive slightly higher temperatures by being able to internally manufacture and deploy a vast array of proteins  and to not generate much heat naturally, basically like a lot of ectotherms (cold-blooded creatures), but you probably worked that out, by, at latest, 1/3rd of the way into the book, if not immediately. And so after 90% of the book which just didn't need to happen, they reach secret base, which is boring. Then the way all the way down to the scary door. And the scary door opens and it turns out the Colonel Kurtz figure isn't actually alive (as mentioned), they're just an AI voice, which again, you probably worked out almost immediately, because it would make no goddamn sense for it to be any other way, and the book has repeatedly stressed how easy it is to lie with video and sound recordings. And then it turns out the CIA-type guy is a killer cyborg but he's immediately killed before he can do anything cool or scary because one of the people with them was actually a cold person just wearing the protection suits. It's a just a massive anti-climax. And the big real is two-fold: firstly that this entire bunch of naughty word was just to get Dr Marx there so they could replace her with a pod-person, but she's a fairly unimportant person with no personal power or wealth or exceptional access, so why is that so important? Never explained. Oh she might be able to mess with a crop in some unspecified and unexplained way? Great. Compelling. Jesus wept Adrian. Second off, oh yeah they have like an unspecified number of pod-person infiltrators among the real humans. But if they're finding it worth of a bunch of them dying, and risking a big return force coming to kill them to get one person? So it can't be "many", can it, despite them claiming that. I guess "many" can mean like three lol. The whole thing is accidentally funny rather than believable or effective. Especially the deeply Simpsons-esque bit where the pod-person reveals herself.[/ISPOILER]Plot holes. I was going to go into some extreme detail here, but I dunno, I don't feel like it even does a good enough job to deserve that. So putting it shortly:1)[ISPOILER]No, being able to live with a body temperate of say 42 or even 45 C does not mean you will be "immune to disease", and no, most diseases do not kill "by fever" (COVID, for example, fever deaths were negligible, virtually all deaths were respiratory-related), and you'd need to go to like 50 C+ to reliably use heat to kill a lot of stuff (including COVID), which is not plausible as being survivable without severe long term brain/organ damage in an organism as complex as a human, even with "different proteins". Given that the author has established this is a huge issue, causing perhaps bigger problems than climate change, there's no reason it wouldn't be like, 80-90% as bad for the cold people, and they'd also probably have to deal with much worse problems with fungal disease (which tend to infect ectotherms).[/ISPOILER]2) [ISPOILER]He keeps trying to have his cake and eat it re: whether anyone will come looking. He writes up a whole bit about how interest in the zone peaks every 20 years and loads of people will be coming back here and also loads of people have some idea about what's going on, but then has the antagonists say "Oh well once we've eliminated this one expedition our pod-person will cover it up!" and it's like, sure, but what about all the corporations and governments and so on? You clearly don't have pod-people for all of them when you're so desperate to pod-person one naughty word low-end low-access scientist.[/ISPOILER]3)[ISPOILER]I'm sorry but "Everyone works from home most of the time" and "everyone kind of lives in a bubble" does not negate: A) the pod-people (who are simply de-greened cold people) don't even look like normal humans in person, and B) you, the author have already established at length the blood is constantly tested. There's just no way that doesn't end up also catching a wildly genetically different human subspecies sooner or later, especially as their blood is going to full of weird proteins and antibodies, and there's no way in a corporate-controlled world that they're not using the information for profit, so would be even more sure to bump into anything interesting.[/ISPOILER]4) The biggest one, and one I'm surprised he missed is - biologically, everything has a cost. [ISPOILER]Being able to manufacture and switch very rapidly into a huge number of different protein setups would have a cost. A huge cost. You can maybe refine organs and structures that nature hasn't perfected but this isn't that. Nothing is free. What the cost would be, I'm less certain of, but there's a reason we don't have "do it all" organisms, and why we have to have machines and tools and so on to "do it all" instead. I suspect their brain would have to be fundamentally different (probably less good) to operate on the multi-protein basis. And I don't buy this "They'd be fine in the arctic" claim - they'd barely be able to move, thermal clothing wouldn't work properly for them as they can't generate heat properly, they'd get a fungal disease no human has ever caught before and bloody die is what would happen.[/ISPOILER]And the books wants to be clever, it wants to ask the question, does humanity deserve to survive, and what is humanity anyway? Valid questions! Question that Tchaikovsky has explored at great length and with great intelligence and humanity in other books. Questions he regularly addresses very well. But Saturation Point doesn't earn either of those questions. [ISPOILER]Humanity isn't effectively portrayed as the real problem - it really seems like corporations and billionaires are, as usual (as they are in real life, I would suggest). And the replacement humanity, who I don't think even gets any kind of name, the cold people I guess, are shits. They're just as bad as us, possibly worse, because they seem to be innately cruel (based on all the ones we meet) and to get pleasure from the suffering of "hot" humans. Like, that's the reason to oppose them - they're even worse but the book doesn't acknowledge this, and it sort of acts like it hasn't portrayed them as absolute dead-eyed psychopaths, mentally torturing poor Marx at the end just for literally giggles (they're laughing about it), when they could just have been honest and direct and made their case in a compelling way - it would have cost them nothing at all. They remind me of nothing as much as the Elves from Discworld. This might work if the takeaway was supposed to be "don't screw things up because the next lot might be even worse", but that's not the approach taken, rather we're supposed to be going "Hmmm who really has the right to exist!?". I'm going to go with NOT "the ones who are basically portrayed as innately evil, who aren't even shown to commit one single act of kindness, decency, altruism or mercy, even to each other, in the entire book! And who as a bonus use "We were just following orders!" as a defence for murder"[/ISPOILER]TLDR: In the end, the whole story could basically have been an 8-minute segment in one of the very few bad Treehouse of Horrors in the Simpsons. That's what it comes down to. That's the level story operates on. It's like "OOOOOOH SPOOKY!" and "MAKES YOU THINK" it's like, no, it's not spooky, and no, it doesn't make you think - except about hackneyed tropes and plot holes! < ba-dump-tssht ></blockquote>

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