Book review: Fractal Noise

Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini is a bad book. Ironically I read it because I mistook him for Paolo Bacigalupi of The Windup Girl. But I now discover he is Eragon and so on. That fits much better; the formulaic and entirely flat texture of this book is no match for TWUG but fits well with Eragon.

To get the title out of the way, it is irrelevant. I doubt Our Author has a clue what it means; certainly it plays no part in the plot. And why anyone would bother build a transmitter to broadcast the Fibonacci numbers (or whatever it was) is beyond me. Never mind.

The plot (really, I'm going to assume you don't bother read the book, so I feel no qualms about giving the plot away): after discovering a mysterious makes-no-sense giant massively powerful alien transmitter on a far planet, sufficient excuses are assembled to justify sending down a motley crew of four to travel on foot to go for a look. For lulz, the four are ridiculously ill-matched and authority is poorly defined. "Zones" with no physical reality are defined around the object, so that the book can have convenient chapters as they cross these zones; laughably, at one point the Central Character is surprised that nothing is visible as he crosses the imaginary lines on the map.

The CC is given a heart-rending backstory - which I skipped - to agonise about as he walks; this fails to disguise the Author's lack of writing ability.

In the end, it was exactly as I expected: the CC arrives at the object, and nothing is revealled or discovered. In an appendix, the Author reveals that he originally expected the story to be about 15 pages long; and really, there is no more than 15 pages of thought in this book.

Duplicated review at Goodreads. My Scifi and Fantasy reviews.