Taiyo Fujii

Sci-fi thriller where a group of people join together to attempt to fight against terrorism from low Earth orbit. Plot itself was interesting & fun to read. I also appreciated the incorporation of physics & CS (though I admit that, as someone who has studied CS, some of that was difficult for me to believe). The story is told by switching between point of view of several different characters, to the point where it could get confusing. The characters themselves often felt like caricatures as well. But enjoyable overall… (més)

I enjoyed Cixin Liu's trilogy and started actively looking for some foreign SF when I came across several sites promoting Orbital Cloud. The teaser looked interesting enough and I bought it as a digital book, since the local book store didn't have it. That probably should have been a red flag. At least this wont end up in a donation bin and be inflicted on someone else.

I haven't finished the book, and I will never finish the book. From the get go it annoyed me. The rich investor/rocket industrialist/entrepreneur is such a blatant copy of Elon Musk, I don't know why he's not named Elon Musk. Except that he lacks any actual character to make him interesting. The nerd of questionable morals is the stereotype of the morbidly obese extreme loner with no social skills. The female characters are described first by their physical attributes: "a black pantsuit and long coat concealed her toned body." And it turns out that character is the female spy-runner who has to have sex with her asset once a week to keep him from wandering off. She's running an economic scam that sells "more than a million" crappy computer cables for $300 each, "are practically free to manufacture" and only netted $2.2 million. So, gross of over $300 million. Profit 0.7% Less than one percent. That's the WORST SCAM EVER. And this is supposed to show her as this manipulative evil genius. And apparently every part of the US has even more surveillance than central London.

But the part where I just put it down and was done was when I read "One thousand and twenty-four, that's two to the power of seven." NO. IT BLODDY WELL ISN'T. And the line isn't from a character that is supposed to not know that. It is one programmer explaining it to another. Which no programmer would ever need to explain. And the (egregiously incorrect) explanation does nothing to inform the reader or further the plot. Ok, the author is Japanese, the novel was written in Japanese and translated to English. That might explain some of the clumsy language. But I'm pretty sure base two math works the same way no matter what country you're in. I don't care if it is the author, the translator or both that is criminally incompetent. At page 54/327 I'm done and I'm not reading another single word. I just wish I could get my time and my money back.… (més)