Noumenon

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Imagine a book which starts out like Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. The middle is a little like the start of Red Rising by Pierce Brown. The end is somewhere between Children of Time and The Freeze-Frame Revolution. That is sort of where Noumenon lies.

I wouldn't say I loved Noumenon. But it also wasn't terrible. The premise is that a scientist finds a star, and humans decide to send a fleet of ships to investigate this star. Its a story set on a generational ship, so there are going to be some predictable elements. The strange thing is that this book features all the plot points you would expect from a book like this.

Losing contact with earth, revolutionaries trying to take over the ship, reaching the goal of the mission, mechanical problems, then getting back to earth. It almost felt like the author had a list of items which needed to be featured in the story. But the result was it felt like they had been shoehorned in.

What made it harder to enjoy the book was the characters. The story is told through a series of short stories. All told from the point of view of different characters on the fleet. With a good amount of time between these stories. The result was that it was hard to feel for the characters. Because you're only with them for a short while.

But the fleet is staffed by clones, so you have different generations of the same clone appearing. It's almost like you're to think of the character is the same, though they are on a different version of the clone. But that doesn't work because a huge plot point of the book is showing how clones are different, even though their DNA is the same.

It probably didn't help that I read Noumenon immediately after Record of A Spaceborn Few so it was hard to no compare the two. Both are about a fleet of generational ships, on a journey for one reason or other. But where the Becky Chambers book excelled is that it's a little story, with the setting in the background. Yes, it's on a ship travelling somewhere, but it's not about that.