SPSFC3 First Phase Mini Reviews
Who Built the Humans
by Phillip Carter
My Vote:
Undecided.
Note on Votes: A Yes/No vote is just my own. The other judges in the team might vote differently. Undecided usually means I think it has potential but I still have others to read before ranking them by personal preference.
Summary:
At ~11% read.
Um … how do I describe what I’ve read? – a work of massive ambition is probably the best way around it … tbh I don’t think I’ve read enough to say what’s going on. The author has dubbed them as stories from different realities, or dimensions. Are they linked? I have no idea. I’m assuming so. If not then this book might be disqualified under the competition rules.
Overall impression & Criticisms:
I’m gonna be honest. I have no idea how to review this one. It’s a bit – crazy – and there were parts I loved and others that made me groan and wish it was over already. It’s a real mixed bag for me – but don’t worry, I think when I weigh it all up, I liked more than I disliked. ~ unfortunately I only managed to read just over 10% here instead of my usual 20%. I was falling behind a bit on my schedule and wasn’t making as much progress as possible. But again, on the up side. The last chapter had me all excited. I really, really enjoyed that one.
What we have is an almost “Choose your Own Adventure” format. Which is pretty cool, I’ve always pondered on writing one of those … but at the same time it’s not a choose-your-own-adventure (or at least not quite) – how can that be? Well the chapters seem to all be a different dimension, each has its own unique voice and tale, and the end of the chapter lets you read the book linearly (ie you jumping between dimensions/Earths) or for you to skip ahead and continue reading that “dimension” – sometimes it even splits into more than one optional skip to. Which is where the Choose Your Own Adventure vibe comes into play.
And I really do mean that each dimension has its own “Style” – or at least enough distinct writing styles to separate them. One is completely poetry (which I was horrified at, at first only to discover that I really, really REALLY dig this poetry {there’s almost a Waitsian gritty reality but also positivity to it}), some are in third person, some 1st, one seems to be looking out at the universe from inside someone’s soul … again, I haven’t read enough to really understand what’s going on. But what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that Phillip went up and beyond the average author (and probably beyond the non-average one too) – he really dug deep to pull this together, and though not all of them hit with me, the sheer magnitude of the effort hasn’t escaped me, and I guess the fact that not all worked for me means that there’s probably bound to be stories within that works for everyone (one would hope anyway) – I find it truly fascinating.
I did start off writing tiny notes on each chapter as they came but gave up after a bit. It’s just too broad and big to narrow down my thoughts on odd chapters that I don’t have an overall picture on yet.
As for deciding on voting I’m also not sure if this one breaks the rules of no anthropology, so might have to wait for others to read it. If it’s okay I’m leaning towards a soft yes.
