Sleeping Giants, Sylvain Neuvel
Score: 4
Spoilers? Yeah, totally.
Be sure to check out my Scoring Scale to see what the score means.
Sleeping giants was basically like watching Pacific Rim: it basically just dulls the fact that you don’t have anything better to do. Honestly, this book wasn’t very good on so many levels, but there was just enough intriguing elements sprinkled throughout that I couldn’t justify not finishing it. Basically, I was pretty happy to be done with it, until there was a surprise twist at the end that made me think, “why not give the next one a try?” That is, in essence, what it takes for me to give something a score of 5: pretty much a waste of time, but it kept me from thinking about traffic on Friday afternoon, so, why not?
The book first caught my attention because of the initial suspense. A young girl discovers a giant hand buried in the ground, only to grow up to become the scientist researching the giant hand. The hand is full of mysteries, and before long, a team of characters is assembled to get to the root of them. They find that the hand is part of a giant robot, and that the giant robot comes from an alien civilization. From there on out it is a steady stream of small discoveries leading up to the realization that this robot is a weapon capable of immeasurable destruction. The similarity to Pacific Rim goes beyond the giant robots thing: the robot has to be manned by two pilots, cerebrally linked.
The book reads like series of cliches strung together in the hopes of getting a movie deal. Really, I listened to the whole thing thinking, “I should probably just stop, this is making me too angry.” So often the plot reads like Sylvain just started writing and then made it up as he went. For example, they find the robot, but (oh no!) the beings who made it have knees that don’t bend correctly. So, when a pilot for the craft is discovered, he gets his legs smashed and the doctors build him legs that, you guessed it, bend backward. The plot line that brought this about are so out of keeping with all the characters involved, that it all feels contrived.
Really, it just seemed like Sylvain was bored and wanted to see if he could get this published. Either that, or it’s targeted at a much younger audience than me. But there is a fair amount of cursing and a bit of sex, so I don’t see how that would fly. It all just seemed like hodge podge of characters he found interesting, robots he though would be “cool”, and a thrown together plot that didn’t do much. One of the main characters is such a misfit for the whole story that I found myself wondering, “is this just Sylvain writing himself into a robot story?” There is a French Canadian linguist from Montreal who ultimately becomes the linchpin for piloting the giant craft. In the following book, he ends up having a mental break after killing one of his closest loved ones. He tinkers with building model ships to help recover.
As I was reading this book, I felt a bit guilty writing such a bad review, then I found Sylvain’s bio, and the whole thing made a lot more sense:
Sylvain Neuvel dropped out of high school at age 15. Along the way, he has been a journalist, worked in soil decontamination, sold ice cream in California, and peddled furniture across Canada. He received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. He taught linguistics in India, and worked as a software engineer in Montreal. He is also a certified translator, though he wishes he were an astronaut. He likes to tinker, dabbles in robotics and is somewhat obsessed with Halloween. He absolutely loves toys; his girlfriend would have him believe that he has too many, so he writes about aliens and giant robots as a blatant excuse to build action figures (for his son, of course).
Essentially, Sylvain wrote himself into a giant robot fantasy book. That makes me both annoyed, and less guilty about writing about his books.
Really the only reason I read the second book was because it ends with someone who was dead reappearing on the other side of the world, alive and 4 years younger…and I like the voice actor who plays an aliens eyebrow-less ancestor.
Recommendation: this was not a good book; don’t read it. Unless you’d like to see a guy fantasize about being a hotshot linguist robot pilot, don’t waste your time.
