Alien weirdshit

[kelkyag]

Around 8am (why, yes, I am a nightshifted goof ... but I wasn't that nightshifted) I finished "Alien Influences" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It wasn't bad, but I was disappointed; I felt like the pieces could've come together into a much more compelling tale. It had lots of good moments and promising plot twists, but it never came together for me as a story. The person who looked like he was going to be a fine, fascinating, and deeply conflicted main character through the first section of the book dropped back to being a secondary character and rather a jerk for the later sections. The subsequent protagonist was fine and sympathetic, but I never found him as interesting or felt like we understood more than superficially what made him tick (or that he did, though I suppose he was trying to figure that out himself). The main aliens kept getting a little more annoyingly weirdshit each time we learned more about them, which I found undermined the fascination of the human/alien culture clash. There's still plenty to like, people (and aliens) being what they are, good, bad, and ugly, idealistic and disillusioned and changing across the years, but given where it started, I wasn't really satisfied with the ending.

Given my foolish post-dawn bedtime, I was fairly pleased to uncurl of my own accord after about seven hours feeling like I was into my active phase for the day and ready to go.