Book review: Massif

By Garth "Sabriel" Nix; which I enjoyed. Though I see I would consider my standards of a review in the old days to be intolerably brief now.

I enjoyed this book; it is a fun easy read. There is the odd "bad" person in it, but they don't get in the way and are quickly resolved out, thereby removing digressions that in other works would distract us for hundreds of pages. This one is relatively brief and to the point, and indeed at the end it does have a point, or at least a conclusion, again beating many another book. The lightness of tone, the lack of depth, gives it a YA-ish flavour; as does the humdrum language. But this is the best actual scifi I've read for a while.

I think I won't trouble you with the plot or the reveal; suffice to say that everything moves along nicely. I can raise a few quibbles though without spoiling things: the most obvious is the DB doesn't need to give Our Heroes a spacehip and has no motive for doing so (except as a backup? And yet, why be so rushed, in a species nominally trillions of years old. Although "trillions" is careless, being older than the universe, and unnecessary; billions would have been harmless); and had he not done so, his dastardly plot would have come to fruition.

I noticed a thing at the end, which in retrospect I guess is often used, but I haven't consciously remarked it before: the "reveal" is intertwined with "rescuing a comrade who needs urgent medical or might die", so that in getting carried away with how the rescue goes, we get dragged rapidly over the reveal part, and are less likely to trouble ourselves with its sanity.