Amorphous – Breaking the Mold by Steven Burgess
Amorphous – Breaking the Mold by Steven Burgess
Synopsis:
In Steven Burgess’s quirky near-future sci-fi novel, an interstellar object disguised as a comet crashes into a California golf course restaurant, unleashing a sentient slime mold that takes on a form of a journalist and poses an threat to humanity. An eclectic group of wisecracking characters bands together to rescue their friend and confront the invading entity, enlisting a quirky AI along the way. Told primarily through humorous dialogue that highlights diverse personalities and absurd situations, the story blends first-contact tension with psychedelic surrealism and philosophical musings on communication and non-human intelligence.
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Review
The plot for the book sounded interesting to me. The Blob alien invasion with some humor of 2001’s Evolution movie, sounded like a decent pickup. I did not like this book at all. The plot fails to even start. I was halfway through the book and turning page after page before anything started to get going. The switch of character POV for each chapter adds nothing and continues to build nothing on top of it. The dialogue is painful, and especially the scenes of reporters who are written like cartoon reporters you’d find parodied in Robocop are unreadable. They repeat their names and stammer inanely. The quirky AI talked about in the book’s synopsis is hardly in the book and is also hard to read. If not for the fact that I agreed to review the book, I would not have been able to read it to even the halfway point. I’m really sad that I didn’t get The Blob book I was hoping for.
Final Grade
F
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