Fractal Noise – Paolini (2023)

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Fractal Noise – Paolini (2023)

Before reading this book it is important to know that it is very much a “it’s the journey, not the destination” type of story. The crew of a mining ship discover a giant, perfectl…

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Before reading this book it is important to know that it is very much a “it’s the journey, not the destination” type of story. The crew of a mining ship discover a giant, perfectly round hole on a planet emitting a powerful radio signal. They undertake an expedition to investigate the hole. The whole book is about the journey to the hole and does not reveal anything about the mystery of the hole itself. During the journey we get to know the characters involved. The supporting characters are somewhat one-dimensional, though there is arguably some evolution of the main character.

The plot is principally: “Sleigh ride in a blizzard through hostile terrain with a cast of conflicting characters.” It has twists and turns, and an escalating series of conflicts amongst the crew with periods of tense action but with no grand payoff at the end. There is a spark of inventive hard-SF style problem solving when the expedition is first planned out but that’s it. Nothing else in the story comes close to that spirit.

A big quibble I have with the plot is that no compelling and consistent reason is given for sending humans on foot on the expedition instead of using a vehicle or robots. In fact the marked absence of robots either in a lead or assisting role is puzzling. I get that we won’t have a story if we sent in robots, but then we need a much better case for not using robots.

I should warn you that the main character is depicted as suffering from depression. It is a bold choice, but the depression is depicted too bluntly and the author may have gone overboard with it at the start of the book. I never quite connected with the main character, but kept reading hoping that at some point the main journey would end and we would learn about the hole. Because this never happened I was quite disappointed because I felt I had slogged through a somewhat tedious and depressing journey and come away with not much. If I had been more invested in the main character, I perhaps would have found it a better read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Personal notes: quibbles, notes on style and structure. Some spoilers.​

Characters​

It is a bold decision to make the main character suffer from quite severe depression. The overall story is about how the character begins to over come the depression by assuming responsibility for the people around him, which is great in theory, but needs skillful execution, which is lacking here. Aside from the depression, the main character is curiously flat – I can’t remember a single other thing about him. To be honest, I even don’t recall his core expertise. At some point in the latter half of the journey he stops being submissive and turns into a competent engineer which heralds him coming out of his shell, but at that point I checked the pages and decided we were not going to learn about the hole and I wasn’t very enthused by it.

The other characters are flat and are based on disturbingly simple racial stereotypes: The bear like, uncouth, violent, selfish Russian with bad English. The timid, inscrutable East Asian without a personality. The European bible basher. While at times it seemed the characters were following something written down in a character sheet, in some cases interactions and dialog were quite good. But the unevenness and the completely unnecessary reliance on racial/ethnic stereotyping put me off.

Accents, broken speech​

The author has tried two experiments which we are often told not to try.

One, he has written the Russian with a cartoonesque, 1980s cold war movie Russian “accent.” This experiment, surprisingly succeeds. We are told to be careful with accents and evoke the impression of the accent/mannerism by sparing use, so as not to disrupt the reader’s flow and annoy them. The Russian accent succeeds perhaps because we have them so often in the movies (and in real life) and the Russian accent written down is English with the redundant words taken out and a slight corruption of tenses and genders. I would however, not repeat this in other circumstances. A French accent or an “Indian” one would fail if done in this literal manner.

Two, there are numerous instances when the communication between teams is disrupted, and the author writes out whole chunks of dialog and then removes parts of words. Because the dialog wasn’t so important I didn’t try to puzzle out what the words were and simply skipped the dialog and found in most cases this didn’t hamper anything – another example of quite redundant writing. This I would definitely not try to repeat in my own work.

Texting​

An important fraction of the dialog is texts between the crew. The author uses angle brackets (<…>) to offset this dialog, and indicate who is texting which works. It plays an important role as sidebar conversations, as talking behind someone’s back, and as a device to indicate when communications are getting difficult. Unlike the broken speech attempt, the garbled texts, used sparingly, are effective, though like the broken speech, seem a bit too much like a movie script.

Redundant dream sequences​

There are annoyingly frequent dream sequences which do not add to the story at all. I tried to come up with scenarios where I would write dream sequences in a story and I could not come up with any compelling reasons. We are already inside the MC’s head: we know their state of mind. I suppose we could add a supernatural touch to the story by having prophetic dreams, or reveal an unconscious side of their character not seen during their waking moments. The writing here does neither of these, leaving me wondering why no one advised the author to take them out.

Promises not kept​

After you’ve read a few books you develop an intuition for predicting, when you get to the half way mark, whether the author will be able to bring the story home: keep the promises they’ve been making along the way. Sure enough, around the half-way mark, at the point where mention is made of some mysterious lights, I have a note “Will these mysteries be solved or forgotten?” A little later, when the main character has a tooth problem (which is, as I guessed, not relevant at all for the story) I have a note “At this point the author is inventing problems to procrastinate the denouement.” The story is not going well when I make notes like this.

Series potential​

The tag line says “A Fractalverse Novel” which suggests that there will be later books that will say more about the fractal speaker and the civilization that built it. This first book is 300 odd pages and a tad too long for an introductory novel: it introduces us in depth to only one character. Of the three characters he interacts with in depth, two of the better described ones die, and the one who lives is a rather nondescript, one. We learn nothing of the alien world and very little of Alex’s own world. If the author does intend to create a series, this first book feels artificially drawn out.

Illustrations​

There are decently done maps and several illustrations from a helmet cam (probably Alex’s) point of view. These are butchered in the kindle edition I had, but come out nicely in the Netgalley app.

Bigger scientific quibbles​

EMP shielding: They decide not to use a crawler because they’ll need heavy lead plating to protect it from the EMP. EMP is not ionising radiation so the use of lead is puzzling. It is even more puzzling because later we are told they have a special paint that goes over the spacesuits to block the EMP. Why not use the paint on the crawler? If ionizing radiation was a problem, then the suits would be of no use.

Absence of robots: As mentioned before, they seem to have artificial intelligence, so it’s surprising that they didn’t send robots, at the very least along with the expedition.

Direction of wind: Another big annoyance for me was the storm – the sand blizzard that the expedition has to fight against. Given that the radio pulses are heating up the atmosphere, what should happen is that the super heated air should either be continuously blowing out (heats up the air and causes an explosion, like what happens in a lightning strike) or blowing in (heats up the air and sends it up, cold air rushes in from the sides) but whatever happens, happens from all directions. In the story the wind blows in one direction.

Why can’t the land yachts be sailed in: I liked the idea of the land yachts (another idea never developed in the book) but it was marred because they never discuss using a sail to ride towards the hole. Ships sail into the wind by tacking, using a zig-zag pattern, and using the sail as a wing. This never occurs to the author, which is a let down, and another big hole in the plot.

There was a whole host of other minor scientific inaccuracies that I noted down while reading, but can’t be bothered to list. Suffice to say, these all added to my annoyance.

Very minor trope observation: “Hazard pay”​

The grumbling discussion amongst the crew about pay, hazard pay and bonuses if they have to investigate the phenomenon is a bit of a trope and one I first saw in “Alien.” I don’t know if Alien originated it, but the purpose in Alien was to emphasize the blue collar nature of the space crew, contrasting it to the space cadet type of crew in classic SciFi and in real space missions. I don’t know that it buys us much in this story.