#i also had to rewrite twice cause i kept getting mad and going on tangents and fucking up my formatting and my plans
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i saw the tags about mazeway and i've never ever read it i need to know what makes it so bad you've got me curious
okay fucking BUCKLE UP then, cause you’re in for a treat! since I legally cannot do anything by halves (adhd) get ready for an essay of a post methodically breaking down everything that sucks about this book so you never need to do yourself the disservice of experiencing it. if you happen to like this book and had a great, fulfilling time reading it, that's great! feel free to tell me all about how i'm wrong and why, because I did not :) spoilers ahead, all ye who enter here, although once again NOT A BOOK RECOMMENDATION !!!!
(i will say there are some actual recommendations at the end though. if anyone feels like scrolling for approximately seven years)
a little meet-the-author before we begin: jack williamson was born in Arizona in 1908. actually I say Arizona, but at the time Arizona wasn't a state yet- it was still a territory. his career as a science fiction writer started when he was 20, and he is (rightfully) considered one of the deans of sci-fi. along with writers like isaac asimov, williamson was among the writers who developed a lot of the new-wave concepts and tropes that are common today.
Mazeway was published in 1990, when our beloved author was 82. It is 262 pages long, and has 43 chapters. It was supposed to be the first in a series, and a second book was allegedly drafted, but from about this time to the end of his life Williamson flitted from project to project, which means several of his later books are also the first in a series which was never written. By then Mr Williamson was getting old and, according to my dad, "kind of losing his mind," which. With how this book ended I could definitely see that being true! And personally I am very glad this one ended up being a stand-alone.
Let me start by saying that this book is not all bad, it's just an overwhelming majority bad. Solid 83% bad. This actually makes it more frustrating, because those little nuggets of light in the darkness give me a glimpse into what the book could have been, and honestly it could have been pretty good. Actually I know you came here to hear about why this is NOT a book recommendation but I'm going to start with what I liked and get to the terrible steaming shit piles later.
First off, the concept for the overall main plot is pretty interesting. I couldn't engage with it as much as I would have liked (for Reasons), but the pitch my dad gave me when he recommended it to me made it sound like something I would like. In broad strokes, we follow a young human man named Benn who lives on a space station located somewhere far from earth. Despite the fact that humanity was rescued from earth after the skynet collapsed, the intergalactic alliance/organization taking care of them doesn't consider their species a part of the alliance, because they have never had a member of their species successfully complete the Game of Blade and Stone (henceforth referred to as the Game), so obviously they are incompetent and can't be allowed to make their own laws, have their own government, decide where to work/live, etc. Of course Benn decides that he is going to to go the planet Stone where the Game is held and compete so humanity can become a valued member of intergalactic society. And yeah by now in the year of our lord 2024 this is a story we've seen some version of a hundred times before, but 35 years ago it was a fairly novel concept, and tbh I am a simple bitch. It takes very little to get me intrigued.
Second, the magic/technology system. It was terrible, actually, and not a system at all, just kind of a collection of words that meant things and let people do stuff like fly through the vacuum of space. I still kinda liked it, though, and I feel like it had a lot of promise. It's technically not magic since it's biology-based and relies on made-up laws of made-up physics, and I love when creatures have special biological features that let them do magic-adjacent things, so even if I was annoyed by the way it was explained, I mostly enjoyed it. If you're a physics guy in any capacity it definitely feels like it was created by a guy who had no idea what he was talking about, but Williamson was solidly not a scientist, so I'm giving him a little grace here (for now, at least).
I also really really liked Williamson's aliens; very few of them were humanoid or even anthropomorphic, and one of the main species, the Hydrans, remind me of a fucked up Mr potato head in that they are a sort of lumpy blob that can just. create and move features across their bodies at will. Another was literally just a collection of particles working together like an amoeba. One of my favorites is Wing, who "was a thin triangular being with stubby tentacles jutting from her three corners. Her numerous eyes made a belt of bright black gems around a shining crown that bulged out of her slate-gray flatness." And Williamson clearly thought a lot about his aliens, because we get a lot of information about cultures and reproduction and relationships for a few species- mostly for the Hydrans, since they're a bit part of the story, but there's a few others we get a quick peek into throughout the book. Insert 'i just think they're neat' meme here and give me more freaky non-anthropomorphic aliens in media you cowards !!!
And... that's about it. That's all I liked about this book. General concept for the plot, some of the magic system, and the aliens. Calling that 13% of the book might be too generous but whatever, I'll give some extra points cause I really did love the aliens a lot.
Now, when I look for a book, I'm looking for a few key things. I need an engaging and coherent plot, well-rounded characters, and a satisfying conclusion. Honestly, I'll sacrifice plot for good characters, because if I can't connect with the people on the page, I don't care what they're doing. Sounds simple enough, but again, I am a simple bitch.
And yet, somehow, despite the apparent simplicity of my request- SOMEHOW this book managed to not tick a SINGLE ONE of my boxes. NOT ONE. In fact this book just decided it hated me specifically and needed to personally victimize me at every turn, because SOMEHOW it managed to do the OPPOSITE of those three simple things.
We'll start with characters, since that's my big thing. They were shit. They were bland and infuriating and had no consistency. Benn, who is supposed to be our knight in shining armor that we support at every turn, is literally the flattest fucking white bread ass male lead I've ever had the misfortune of encountering, to the point where I'm convinced has got to have been a self-insert. The other two protagonists- who I haven't even mentioned yet- were just as bad; one of them, named Don Diego Bolivar, was kind of (??) the villain, complete with some concerningly racist undertones, and the other, Roxanne Kwan, was the Sexy Woman With Knife that this era of sci-fi was obsessed with. Even though she's supposed to be cool and strong, she's about as useful as Benn is, and mostly spends the book being creeped on by Bolivar. She does not kill him even though she totally has the skills and would have been completely justified in it. None of them do much in the book other than react to whatever wacky circumstances they manage to find themselves in, and while it was annoying how little any of them knew about anything, it was infuriating how little motivation any of them had to actually learn the things they didn't know. To me, that's a sign that Williamson didn't bother figuring out most of the mechanics of this world, which is unfathomable to me as a writer whose favorite part of writing is worldbuilding.
Next let's touch on plot. Oh, you thought I liked the plot? WRONG. I liked the concept for the plot, and I was really hoping it would blossom into a beautiful story. Unfortunately, Jack Williamson apparently cannot write something comprehensible to save his life. Every single sentence was overwritten, forced to run on and on until all it could do was collapse from exhaustion and finally die. Core concepts were introduced in the last 10 pages of the fucking book, and multiple things happened for literally no reason. There were several plot threads that felt like they should be wrapped up and then just never were, which means I was just confused forever. Even if there had been more to the series, there were way too many things to smoothly bring them all into the second book. Character motivations were often dumb, convoluted, or just straight up never explained.
And Jesus fucking Christ, the pacing of the whole thing- or rather the lack thereof. The end of the book tried to make up for all the time wasted on flowery prose by whizzing through multiple plot points at a dizzying speed. We were constantly being thrown around through space and time- We're on this ship! No, we're on this planet! We're doing this thing, but actually it's time for a random unrelated flashback that will do nothing except confuse you, both now and later when some obscure half-remembered detail is brought up and you have to flip back to chapter 7 to figure out what the fuck is being talked about! Sometimes this would happen in the middle of a scene, which was always jarring. There was one instance early on where Roxanne finds her father's dead body, and instead of continuing this scene and preserving all the yummy built-up tension, we jump away to our favorite white boy Benn and get four pages establishing a b-plot that will never be resolved, and then go back to Roxanne at the exact same moment we just left off. Why did we leave?? To ruin the atmosphere and confuse your reader?? If so, great job! So much of this book was just me screaming What are you doing!! and then suffering some more.
Also, just as a quick aside- remember how the book is 262 pages and 43 chapters, which comes out to ~6 pages per chapter? Yeah. Since there wasn't enough happening already, every chapter the perspective changes between our protagonists, and most of the chapters don't even hit that magic page count; most land between 2 and 3. This could be fine, except that our dear author has apparently never heard of developing a character's voice, so all three of them sound exactly the same: flatter and drier than a stale Triscut, and with infuriatingly little knowledge about how the world around them works.
Back to the magic again, because I have more to say actually. Unlike a lot of other new-wave sci-fi writers, Williamson wasn't a scientist. That's why I gave him so much room with his shitty not-magic system, which I'm now going to explain to you just a little bit. He uses the phrase nanionic forces, which is the manipulation of sub-atomic particles called nanions, which are smaller than quarks. At the nanionic level, we reach a "horizon of reality" where nanionic particles flicker out of existence and back again, a trillion times in a trillionth of a Terran second. If that doesn't make sense, cool, it doesn't really matter, that explanation will never be brought up or expanded on again. But I really like the idea of a species that moves by interacting with a sort of "negative" matter so to speak, and I wish we had gotten a better explanation for how it works.
Like nanionic particles/forces, the skynet is also based on a real or theoretical scientific concept which is then heavily modified. This time, instead of something small, it's based on something big- a Dyson Sphere. Instead of surrounding a star, the skynet surrounded the Earth's outer atmosphere in a grid-like pattern. What did it do? Great question. People lived up there; in fact, most people seem to have lived up there, and the ones who didn't were all poor and stupid. There were elevators that connected it to the earth and let people move between the surface and the skynet. It maybe harvested energy from the earth like a Dyson sphere would do to a star, but it's not... really clear. And it will never get clearer, because when the skynet fell to earth, most people died, and the ones who didn't just don't ever talk about it. There doesn't seem to be a reason for that; I really think Williamson just didn't want to go to the effort of actually expanding this incredibly important aspect of his book whose destruction is directly responsible for everything that is happening rn. Interesting choice imo but only one of us is a best-selling author, so okay. Whatever.
But these examples showcase a pitfall of Williamson's: for some reason, he didn't do his research, whether because he didn't care or he didn't realize he needed to. Like, at the time, research was difficult. The internet didn't exist. You couldn't just pull up the wikipedia page on quarks or the Dyson Sphere. But it would have been so easy for Williamson, because all he needed to do was ask his friends who did know about these things. All the big-name new-wave sci-fi authors were friends, and they all worked closely together, and a lot of them were scientists, and all he would have had to do would be send a letter or, shit, pick up the phone, and he would have all the answers he needed. So he had the resources, he just chose not to use them, and his work suffered for it. And I fucking suffered for it reading his work.
Now, about that ending. Oho, the ending.
At the end of the book, Benn, Roxanne, and Bolivar find themselves in front of the judges of the Game (yeah they all end up competing don't worry about it). Benn has forfeit in order to be rescued after Bolivar threw him into a river, but he is still presented to the judges with the rest of the contestants in the ceremony where they learn whether or not they have successfully passed the trials of the Game. None of the three humans passed, and all three of them are ordered to immediately return to their home planets. Bolivar (who I did not understand was the villain until I read this section for the third goddamn time) does some stuff that essentially boils down to appointing himself as the ruler of Earth/the Sun Corporation, proclaiming that the other contestants who didn't pass are now considered citizens of the Sun, and threatening the judges and the entire alliance with his uber-powerful robot/EMP, in that order. In order to stop him, the judges arrest a bunch of people, and then. And then.
And then Benn looks into the robot's eyes and becomes the universe.
No, really. In chapter 43 of this godawful fucking book, Benn hears the voice of a great malicious entity called Conqueror in his mind, and then he falls into the darkness before time and space and experiences the birth of the universe as Conqueror itself. He, as Conqueror, watches stars and planets form, and chooses to be kind instead of evil, and coaxes different species to meet each other between the stars. He watches the skynet fall, and mourns for all the creatures that died during its destruction. And that sounds beautiful, right?
...Right?
I wish I could tell you the end of this book was beautiful and profound. I wish I could tell you it made up for all the overwritten bullshit I had to slog through. I wish I could tell you it made everything worth it. It did not. Instead, after 257 terrible, grueling, exhausting pages, this ending felt more like the book spitting in my face and telling me to take my hopes and dreams up the ass, because somehow this is what saves the day: Benn Dain making eye contact with the evil (???) robot. On accident.
How? Great question. Saves from what? Wouldn't you like to know, weatherboy. Actually, I have many questions, all of them unanswered. What is Conqueror? Is it the universe? How did Benn become it? Why? Is that the robot's scary magic power- it gives you a trip so good you become a great cosmic mass and experience all of time? And what narrative purpose does this serve (outside of magically defeating a villain we have barely established)? Because as far as I'm aware (and I should be fucking aware at this point, having just read the entire book), at no point during Benn's journey was one of his objectives "learn what happened to the skynet". Also, again, how the fuck did that defeat the robot and/or Conqueror???
If someone put a gun to my head and told me to think of a conclusion to this story that makes less sense, I would not be able to. I wish I could, because at least the fact that it could have been even worse would be a silver lining to this shitshow of a book, but alas.
I'm sure at this point you're asking yourself, Finn, why did you even bother making it this far? Why didn't you DNF it the moment Roxanne's common sense shriveled up and died? Well, I would have loved to do that, but unfortunately I read this book for an essay worth 40% of my term grade, and we had already submitted our reading lists, and we were required to submit a reading log for every book on there. I was locked into reading this book whether I liked it or not. And good for you, isn't it? Because now we can all sit here together and have a grand old time listening to me complain by request on the internet. Joy.
OKAY I just woke up and I have a fever of 102 and I feel like absolute shit. let's finish this fucking POST so I can be FREEEE
That's the end of the book, but we still have shit to talk about; namely, racism and misogyny. This book treats POC and women like total shit the entire time, and that's honestly why I'm so adamant that this isn't a recommendation. Problems with characterization and plot and worldbuilding- those are all subjective. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who would love this story and all of the things I consider flaws. But I cannot in good conscience tell people to read it with the way these topics are handled. I'm not going to try to get too far into it because it's been a couple years since I actually sat down and read the book, but I did skim it in order to write this, so here are the obvious things that jumped out at me. My brain is mush rn so I'm probably gonna miss stuff but you'll get the gist hopefully
Bolivar's mother is specifically stated to be from Ecuador, and the town she's from is described as a "squalid barrio." She fakes an ID so she can work as a prostitute somewhere in the skynet, and that's where she meets- and promptly has an affair with- Bolivar's father, who is a wealthy businessman. She dies when the skynet falls, because she's working in a nightclub at the time. Bolivar himself is prone to bouts of violence and rage, has no loyalty to anyone but himself, and is a power-hungry egomaniac. He's also a creep to Roxanne on several occasions, flirting with her incessantly even after she has told him multiple times to stop, and even tries to coerce her into sleeping with him when they are forced to share a hotel room. The other Latino character is treated no better; he's a fairly minor character, but upon meeting him Roxanne immediately has a Bad Feeling and doesn't trust him. She turns out to be justified in this when he kills her father and his best friend and leaves her in the desert to die. He and Bolivar are similar in many ways: they are both violent and serve only themselves. The only obvious difference is that Julio speaks Spanish constantly, in that jarring way that monolingual people write bilingual characters, where random ass words and phrases are sprinkled in with little care to whether or not it makes sense. I don't feel like I have to explain to you why these things are problematic, and frankly I don't think I would do a very good job if I tried rn, but, like. Oh my god.
Now, let's talk about the ladies. Benn's mother shows up for like two scenes, talks about how cool her husband is, talks about how cool her son is, and then is never mentioned again. She barely exists. There's nothing to say about her except point out how little there is to say. She's one of two women in the entire book, the other being Roxanne. Roxanne has her own problems, mainly inconsistent characterization and very little narrative purpose. She has two reasons to exist: one, to be the heir of the Sun Corps, since she's a Kwan, and they were like the ultra-rich bastards who owned the skynet or something, and two, to save Benn's life when Bolivar throws him off a cliff into the river. That is- and I am not exaggerating here- the one and only thing she actually does in the entire book. She has none of her own motivations and just ends up following Benn or Bolivar around, thinking vaguely about how hot they are, and being otherwise useless. Her skills also disappear when it's convenient; for example, she gets bad vibes about Julio, implying that she's good at reading people, but then when she meets Bolivar she doesn't get any bad vibes from him at all. She's a fantastic hunter, good enough that she earned the nickname Cheetah when she was young, but she still isn't able to kill Bolivar when it counts. Again, many problems. my whole body hurts and I'm mad and I want to be done and you're smart. Misogyny bad send tumble
That's finally it!! I'm finally done ranting!!! I'm gonna go take a goddamn nap!!!!!! Fuck this book to hell and I hope this sated your curiosity. don't read this, read, like, Set My Heart to Five (Simon Stephenson), which I read right after and is still one of the best, most moving things I've ever read, or, if you're interested in something new-wave, Decision at Doona (Anne McCaffrey) or Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov) are both really great choices. If you're not super into sci-fi, Tamora Pierce is a really good fantasy author whose mcs are all well-written badass ladies, and Redwall (Brian Jaques) is a fun adventure with little animals. Just basically what I'm saying is please do not read this book. bye
#nap was good! feeling much better now that my fever broke#sorry anon this took way longer to write than I expected#finals. you understand#i also had to rewrite twice cause i kept getting mad and going on tangents and fucking up my formatting and my plans#thanks for asking though!#might not seem like it but i had a LOT of fun ranting about this shit ass book :)#mazeway by jack williamson#reading#book review#long post
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