I love to read, but unlike many readers, I like the emotions that books provoke in me. The intensity of the narrative, the anticipation for the moment to continue reading, when the book takes part of my day to try to imagine what will happen in the book, my identification or not with a character, the more I hate a character the more I appreciate the author. These are some of the criteria I follow to define whether a book is good or not.
Eversion of Alastair Reynolds it’s just another book in a huge list of books that never made it on a wish list. I just got carried away by the idea of reading a new release, a science-fiction, and the cover (of course).
The story begins by focusing on the experience lived by a doctor who accepts to work as a physician in a mysterious expedition with a limited crew, founded by a millionaire who sees himself as an explorer.
The book is narrated in first person, so we have the doctor’s point of view and like all Brazilians, who must study Dom Casmurro (a Brazilian book allegedly about betrayal). “Did Capitu cheat him or the guy was just paranoid?”. Every time a book is narrated from the perspective of the character, every opinion is questionable, and every fact can only be a perception and not reality (because Brazilians like to exaggerate things so you can never trust).
To my surprise, I haven’t read even 20% of the book when the main character dies. Of course, it was just a dream, he’s still on a ship, and the expedition is a few miles away from going through the same thin ice opening where the accident that causes his death in the dream takes place, but the crossing is peaceful.
After the third death, I confess that I started to get a little frustrated, from then on he not only woke up on a ship, but the expedition was also changing. The only constant was the female character in the narrative.
It would be necessary to give more details of the book in order to understand the complexity that the story unveils from the moment that the expedition becomes a space trip and the main character is actually an AI that refuses to accept that it is not a human being.
I wanted to be disappointed, I wanted to hate the book for having been deceived into believing that the story was being narrated from the perspective of a human character, but the more I read the more I wanted to know the ending, after all, I need to know if the machine would be able to accept and modify the statement it had created and refused to debug.
The prospect of a new segment of literature with characters who are interfaces with human complexity was terrifying and fascinating at the same time. I hated the book almost from beginning to end, mainly because I enjoyed being so often deceived by the linearity of the story and the reflection this novel brought me about the future of machines in our reality.
Meu grão de areia 