Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

O.R.S.:  This book is about the adventures of a former human/now ship AI, which, along with his crew, is charged with salvaging a ship on a strange planet with mysterious ends.  It is largely first-person from the AI’s perspective.

In my first read, I could really feel the author’s enthusiasm for ideas, a kind of breathlessness and speed of ideas, but also a kind of surface-level ingenuity, or perhaps just youthful cleverness, like the author’s use of AI generative poetry (which he makes a point to call out in the foreword,)  that doesn’t quite stick the landing (because in the same foreword, he points out that he edited the AI poetry…so…).   The idea of a sentient ship taking care of a marooned crew on a mysterious planet is, while not new, a fun setting, but the characters and dialogue, which has an off-the-cuff pop culture casualness, and the plot, with exoplanet monsters and more, became more and more lumpy as time went on.  Which made me feel as if there was a legobox of fun ideas that Wijeratne slammed into a story-like structure, not having a grasp yet for character development or strong structure. He’s hardly the first “Ideas” writer to wrestle with these challenges, but nonetheless, it’s a bit of a challenge, as the grippiness starts to wane in the last third. There are definitely moments of nerdily specific technical fun (ala “Wool” or “The Martian”) and the “stranger in a strangeland” feel of a post-human/AI coming to terms with taking care of its wayward wards can be enjoyable.  But there’s less a consistent “The Martian” joy than a kind of self-satisfied show-off-ness which was distracting, as I wanted to say, if you want to be clever, extrapolate more! Really be clever! Like Neal Stephenson Diamond Age clever–but that’s, perhaps, a high bar.  Am chalking it up to youth ness, but really excited for the author to write more!  Clearly he has a voracious appetite for ideas–just needs a tighter overarching story.  Prefer Martha Wells’ Murderbot for similar sentience + humour thing but with more compassion and a sense of pace.  That said, apparently lots of folks like Nathan Fillion’s narration of Salvage Crew, so there’s that.

304p