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Heaven 2.0 (2012)

by Scott Haworth(Favorite Author)

3.26 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Scott Haworth

review 1: I don't usually read much sci-fi so this was an unusual book choice for me. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the story. It was an unusual subject matter but I found it interesting and different. The story had me gripped until about 80 per cent of the way through when I found it rather far-fetched (yes, even for a sci-fi story!) and it did feel that it was rushing to a conclusion. However, it did finish satisfactorily and I won't hestitate to recommend this book.
review 2: This is one of those books that are hard to review. It falls mostly outside of my usual genre choices, but when I got the review request, I just couldn’t resist the concept. I’m glad I read it, and yet there are things that keep me from gushing about it.Plot and ch... morearacters are fairly straightforward, for example. It’s not simplistic, just simple. The story cuts to the chase and leaves out anything that doesn’t propel the plot, which means character development scenes are nonexistent, meaningful relationships are scarce, and the action itself sometimes reads too convenient. I can deal with the character issues, because this kind of story is more about mankind than about any particular person and the author got me invested successfully in the general plight—namely, destroying that crappy 28th century society and doing so by yesterday if at all possible. I truly disliked them with this uneasy feeling in your gut that you reserve for really abhorrent people. In that respect, kudos to Heaven 2.0... because not only it was dreadful, it was also entirely possible.The plot part was a bit harder to swallow. I think a good comparison for this book, in the movie world, would be the Isle (you know, with Ewan McGregor?). It’s that kind of desperate fight against impossible odds, of individuals against the system, of claustrophobia... except that everything was so matter-of-fact, so quick, so straight, that there was no tension. Even when the real action takes place, I had no expectations about the results because it was too farfetched to work. And later, things just fell into place: after all, if you don’t know anything about a huge compound called Hell and you just venture in, how likely are you to actually find the two people you’re looking for in the first try?Another aspect that nagged me a little was the science side of things. The level of tech here is mind-numbing; it needs to be in order for Heaven to exist. In general, breezing through all that as if it was normal, as if it was magic, shouldn’t be a problem, but some sci-fi fans like to have an attempt at explanation behind all the evolution. I liked some details, like pen and paper no longer existing, handwriting being considered a Dark Ages activity, or people crammed up in Mars. Even space-time travel, I could handle. The refrigerators, which are actually matter generators and voice-operated, confused me a bit more, which I understand is ridiculous after you’ve gone an accepted the engineering of Heaven.Perhaps I had trouble transitioning to the future because I had only a very sketchy idea about how we got there. Or perhaps I would just have been happy if you’d thrown in some buttons with the frigs... In any case, a warning here because there’s a lot of progress to take in.Should you read Heaven 2.0? Well, I certainly enjoyed the read. I liked the concept, and I always like to read about human nature. That said, though, I think this novel could have used a few more pages (that’s weird... usually I complain about the opposite!) in order to allow for more detailed characters to make the reader’s investment more personal and in order to muddy up the convenient line of events to create more tension. It’s really short as it is, though, so if you have a chance to check it out you should probably see how you feel about it. less

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