Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SPSFC2 finals. We have whittled our entrants down to a mere seven, all clamouring for the title of SPSFC Champion. So without further ado, here is my take on Night Music, by Tobias Cabral.

I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen Baxter lately, so I’m no stranger to the denser aspects of science fiction. I love a good infodump of scientific principles, and the more plausible it is, the better. Given I’m not a scientist, it’s very easy to sound plausible to my ears, so there’s an added benefit for writers who take that route. Even so, I had a real struggle with how dense Night Music could at times become.

Part of this issue stems from the book’s length. I don’t have the word count to hand, but the digital copy is only one hundred and thirty-five pages long. That’s a novella by today’s standards. Now, I think novellas are a great. More particularly, they’re a great way to explore an idea, or to flesh out a character. Night Music tries to have its cake and eat it too. There are a lot of characters, but none of them make much of an impact, given how little time we spend with any one of them. Seth, at least, is an engaging protagonist, but those around him are rather flat and lifeless. I’ve barely finished the book, and I’m already struggling to draw the lines between names and personalities.

As to the ideas, Night Music fares a little stronger. As an aside, I am perennially amused when science fiction inadvertently predicts the future, so it was a surprise to see a conversation about Russia annexing Ukraine – and then checking to find out that the book was published in 2010. But for the most part, the book is more concerned with events on mars than on Earth. of course, politics rears its ugly head up there as well, and there is inevitably a conspiracy to be revealed. What little I understood of the science, I enjoyed, and wished that there had been a little more flesh on the bones, so to speak. It seems that almost every book in this contest is either too drawn out, or too rushed. While Night Music does have some pacing issues, they are nothing that another fifty pages or so wouldn’t fix.

All things considered, I finish Night Music with more confusion than satisfaction. There are a lot of good ideas in here, but I don’t feel as though they are very well communicated. A book this dense should inspire more of a sense of wonder than it ultimately does. Nevertheless, there are some good nuggets buried within the mountains of jargon, and they are worth reading to get to.

And with that, my SPSFC2 reading comes to an end. We’ll now be discussing and debating the books as a team and combining our final scores into team ratings. Those will be posted in the very near future before being fed into the great spreadsheet along with scores from other teams, and the ultimate winner of SPSFC2 will be announced in July.