Ship of Fools

TL;DR

I didn't enjoy this book. Slow start, it started to get good and interesting towards the end but then it's ending is horrendous. Garbage main character, story with zero answers by the end and atrocious ending.

If you want a similar premise of a group of people boarding a mysterious ship to find out what's going on that are actually a good read The Last Astronaut or Dead Silence.

My Scoring System

I have five things I look for in a book, if the book checks all five it's a 5/5 stars book, if it checks none it's a 1/5 stars and everything else is a combination:

X - Main Story: Sounds interesting and it gets you hooked but if you knew from the beginning that none of your questions will be answered it would be a different experience.

X - Side Stories (if it applies): I don't remember if there were any side stories, I don't think so but even if they were if I can't remember them it means they weren't good to begin with.

X - Characters: Horrible main protagonist, there are a few minor characters that were enjoyable but the mayority are terrible.

✓ - Setting/Ambiance: The main ship is interesting I liked the different parts of it and the mysterious ship they board is also interesting. The ambience was good.

X - Ending: Atrocious ending, zero questions answered and that decision by own main protagonist...wow.

Extensive Review

Our main character is a piece of shit, without spoiling stuff he's pretty much the reason why everything bad happens and at the end he's like "sorry, peace out homies!". I couldn't believe when he made that decision at the end, what a garbage human being with zero honor and principles.

There are a few good characters that I liked but it doesn't matter in the end, again I don't want to spoil stuff but trust me, they didn't deserve what got handed to them.

For a brief few pages the story got really interesting and I was getting excited because we were maybe starting to get some answers. But no, nothing gets answered. From the moment you learn there is a mysterious alien ship found to the end of the book you learn NOTHING at all. Origin, what is is, why it's there, is it alone?... you get nothing at all. So if you plan on reading this book I want you to know what you're getting yourself into:

- Very slow start with weird things shown to us that never gets talked about again...

- A dozen of characters given their full name and a few lines of what our main character thinks about them that we don't care at all because they just vote on stuff when there's a meeting. They literally don't do anything else. There are maybe six charaters that do stuff but we get introduced to at least twelve for no reason...

- Our main character has zero chemistry with anyone, there are characters that expresses their heart and feelings in a few paragraphs and then he chimes in with "Yeah...", "No I don't...". You can say that's just how he is but then I would say why is he the main character? There are three people I can think of in this story that would be better if they were the main character. No excuses, terrible protagonist.

- Nothing happens in the story, you only get questions and more questions nothing gets answered.

- The ending is really bad.

After all those points if I made you curious and you wanna check it out, don't. There are other "boarding mysterious ship" kind of stories out there that are good and worth the read, like the two I've mentioned in my TL;DR.

Very well written book that unfortunately goes nowhere. We have a lot of mystery build up... and that is it. The book ends without an actual ending and with zero explanation of wtf was going on. Very unsatisfying and too bad, since the premises were very well constructed.
recenzie pe larg: https://bloguldesefe.ro/2021/09/12/cand-uiti-incotro-te-indreptai-in-intuneric-destinatia-gasita-nu-poate-fi-decat-una-singura-ship-of-fools-de-richard-paul-russo/

But...but what WERE they? And what WAS that ending? And what happens AFTER? And where did those missing crewmen go? And what were those weird comatose-like symptoms from? :(

Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo

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This turns out to be one of the best science fiction books I've read in a long time.

Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer - it's actually a mash-up of science fiction and horror. Nonetheless, despite the horror elements, the topic of “first contact” is a classic theme of science fiction, and this is a “first contact” on steroids.

The story is gothic. The narroator of the story, Bartolomeo, is a deformed member of a multigeneration ship, the Argonos. The Argonos can move faster than light, but there are still long transit times in interplanetary space. The Argonos itself seems to be quite large; I got the sense of it being the size of a small asteroid. There are different levels in the ship which approximate the social classes from aristocrats at the upper level to impressed dregs who want off the ship in the depths. (Strangely, the “crew” seems to be outside of the class system.) The whole thing is ruled by a Captain, a position which is mostly hereditary but subject to the control of an oligarchy known as the ship's executive council.

Stranger still, there is a Christian (Catholic or Episcopalian) bishop on the ship and he is almost as powerful as the Captain. The bishop plays the heavy in the story.

The population of the Argonos is demoralized. They and their ancestors have been on the ship for so long that no one remembers the mission. It seems that they make contact with inhabited worlds every decade or so as they wander aimlessly in the outer zones of human expansion. How that expansion preceded them, whether there is a civilized core, who sent them out, is unknown and unexplained. Although the fact that the ship incorporates a massive cathedral and has a bishop seems to suggest that its purpose may have been to support a Christian mission to the outer galaxy, but this is speculation, and if that was the case, then the mission is forgotten, although the bishop seems very heavy-handed in his evangelical agenda.

The Argonos receives a distress beacon. If there is one thing we have learned from watching the Alien movies, distress beacons are never good.

The Argonos investigates and finds that the human colony appears to have abandoned this planet, named “Antioch” by the bishop. Bartolomeo learns that this appearance is deceptive when he discovers a strange structure that presents the tortured bodies of the settlement. The Argonos executive council decides that (a) this happened a long time ago, (b) it's not their job to investigate disturbing mysteries, and (c) there's no time to leave like now.

They leave, but on the way out they discover an abandoned alien ship. As far as they know, no human has ever discovered an alien intelligence before. So, they have - HAVE TO! - investigate. Bartolomeo is assigned the investigation of the spooky, empty, alien spaceship where people die in freak accidents on a random basis.

At this point, the story moves into horror territory as the demoralized atmosphere of the Argonos transforms into the creepiness of shadows and echoes. Is the ship empty? Could it be a trap? What about those hundreds of colonist bodies impaled on spikes and tortured?

This story has conflict on a lot of levels. There is a political tension between the bishop and the captain, between the captain and Bartolomeo, who had been life-long friends whos relationship has grown sour, between the social levels on the ship, between those who want to cut and run and those who want to investigate, and, mostly, between, the fear of the unknown and the reality of discovery.

The writing was nicely introspective when that was appropriate. It kept my interest from start to finish, which is saying a lot these days.

This was so much fun! This was the perfect mix of Warhammer 40k, Alien and maybe even a bit of Halo.
More of this please!