Review: Maelstrom, by Peter Watts.

Maelstrom by Peter Watts
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Maelstrom by Peter Watts is the second book in the Rifters series, continuing the story of Lennie Clark, a deeply psychotic woman, part machine, who is the unwitting victim of psychological manipulation and a plague-carrier.

While the first book, Starfish, proved innovative and incisively written, that innovation and incisive writing failed in Maelstrom. There are pages and pages of technical exposition which slows the narrative, angst and violence which for the most part seems gratuitous and without justification. In fact, the narrative becomes so obscure that for two thirds of the novel I was unsure of exactly what was going on.

The world building which began in Starfish greatly diminishes in Maelstrom, offering nothing new to the already overdone SF dominion of dystopia. There was no sense of environment, of place. There was a great deal of burning and mayhem.

Was I sufficiently invested to continue Watt’s journey into the third book, Behemoth? Not really. Overall a great disappointment from a writer I previously touted as being a star in the firmament of Canada’s SF writers.

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