A Darkling Sea Book Review

A Darkling Sea

James L. Cambias

Tor Books (January 28, 2014)

3/5 Stars

 

      A Darkling Sea is an ambitious novel.  The book is about first contact under the surface of a frozen sea on an ice world.  The aliens are highly intelligent fish like creatures.  This is the kind of book that I REALLY love to read.  Except that this book I couldn’t go along with it.  The fish people were to too anthropomorphic, their speech patterns were too human.  They acted far too human.  Especially when in all other respects they were very alien.  I know that this seems like strange criticism.  I mean if the aliens are too ALIEN then the author would have a hard time having one of them as a point of view character.  There would be all kinds of things that the reader would have a hard time understanding.  Yes, that’s all true.  But this book reads more like an episode of one of those 80s or 90s dramas where the kids hear a portion of what their parents are talking about and decide they want to kill all of them.  Hilarity ensues…  Except this wasn’t supposed to be an 80s or 90s comedy.  It’s a science fiction novel.  I just didn’t buy it, but then that’s just me.  Otherwise the book was excellent; and I would recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of Hard Science Fiction.  You might like A Darkling Sea, unfortunately I didn’t,