Starship and Haiku: Somtow Sucharitkul

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

This book is very strange, and not at all the place I would've chosen to start this challenge! It is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and the events largely take place in Hawaii and Japan. Japan is the only country to escape large-scale destruction, but not the despair that followed. Japan has become obsessed with death and dying, and there is a vast social movement toward suicide. The main characters are trying to stop the people behind the suicide propaganda and join a project which is building spacships for people to leave earth.

I found the world of the book fascinating, and many of the images were hauntingly beautiful. But the plot is haphazard at best, and most of the characters are pretty flat. And I found the plot-point about the whales (which is a driving force in the book) to be somewhere between ludicrous and horrendously offensive.

All in all, I don't recommend this book unless you're willing to overlook a lot. I've been told that this is not the best of the author's science fiction, which reassures me, since I have several more of his books on my reading list.