Cover Image: Nucleation

Nucleation

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Member Reviews

Kimberly Unger's Nucleation is a tale that follows Helen Vectorovich’s perspective (told from the third person perspective) of the Line Drive project, with building an interstellar gate as it’s goal. Helen is the top operator for the parent company of the Line Drive project and her job is to remotely operate the main construction vessel nicknamed the Golf Ball from several lightyears away. On the Golf Ball’s maiden voyage, the team experiences “feedback” which kills one of the Line Drive team members. The rest of the story follows Helen’s attempt in uncovering what caused the feedback and how it could harm team members several lightyears away while also trying to shed the blame for the mission failure.

Despite some flaws, I really enjoyed this book. It kind of had a cyberpunk feel without the major cyberpunk themes. For example, the operators remotely control equipment from a “coffin” over a “quantum entanglement” feed and I guess you could consider Helen “hard-boiled”, yet there is no mentioned social order or corporate elite or other themes that you would typically associate with cyberpunk. I really enjoyed some of the unique ideas explored throughout this novel, such as literal golf ball sized spaceships and all space exploration is done remotely. The plot was interesting as well, with Helen trying to accomplish three major tasks: Find out how her teammate could be killed by noise over the quantum entanglement feed several lightyears away. Find out the source of the noise on the entanglement feed. Clear her name of the stigma that comes with piloting a failed mission.
As much as I liked this book, there are some major flaws that I can't let go unaddressed. The whole premise of the novel relies on the “quantum entanglement” principle, which is how operators interact with their equipment and how the noise was introduced that killed Hellen’s teammate. Quantum entanglement was not explored or explained nearly enough. There were several times that I couldn’t understand what was happening because I didn’t understand the general boundaries of what quantum entanglement can and cannot do. I also thought that the ending was left a little too unfinished. I understand wanting to leave it open for the next installment of the series, but it would be nice for a little more closure on some of the plots.
Aside from the points listed above, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to any fan of cyberpunk mixed with a little space opera.

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Interesting story but too much technobabble

On the positive side, the story was interesting and well-paced. There was some character development but not much and I didn’t feel much empathy for the protagonist or any of the other characters. There was also way too much techno-babble that was hard to follow and took away from the story. But the book did hold my attention and overall I did enjoy the read, hence the 4-star rating.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

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I found this gripping, a well-plotted nearish-future mystery in which the SF setting is integral.

Not your usual space opera, though large portions take place in space. Not your usual cyberpunk either, exactly. I mean, there's an evil corporation, but it's not the one the protagonist works for (that corporation is just kind of big and dumb but on the whole doing the right-ish thing, like real corporations, in my experience). And there's quite a bit of time spent, not in virtual reality, but embodied in remote robots using quantum entanglement, which was cool, even if I didn't completely buy every aspect of it all the time. At one point, there's only a single channel to use to the remote location, so the other characters are unable to communicate with the operator. Because her consciousness is so totally embodied in the remote that speaking to her through headphones wouldn't work; she wouldn't be able to hear them. That, to me, was implausible, though generally I found it easy to suspend my disbelief. There was a little bit of "your consciousness is so involved in the technological situation that a glitch in the tech can be dangerous to your brain," which I usually find hard to swallow, but here it was sold better than usual.

There are two mysteries. One is who the local bad actors are and what their deal is, and the other is: what, exactly, did the protagonist meet out there in space in the first chapter? Both of these mysteries progress through gradual revelation. I have to say, as an experienced consumer of fiction I found the foreshadowing a bit obvious, and was well ahead of the protagonist when it came to figuring out what was going on, particularly with the Earth-based mystery. But that's tricky to avoid, and I didn't feel it was done badly.

The writing mechanics are generally good, except that the author has a terrible comma-splicing habit and a tendency to hyphenate things she shouldn't, and uses all-caps instead of italics for emphasis. There are occasional errors of reference (pronouns not referring to what they should refer to, dangling modifiers). The pre-release version I saw from Netgalley also featured quite a few words dropped out of sentences (or left in after editing), some mispunctuated dialog, and some misplaced or missing apostrophes, but hopefully those will be fixed by publication. The quantity of all of these is not overwhelming, and a thorough edit would soon have it in good shape.

The characters are not nearly as hopeless, aimless, or alienated as is often the case with SF set in the relatively near future; the protagonist has a strong personal reason (eventually, more than one) to get to the bottom of the mystery, and it provides good direction and momentum to the plot.

Overall, a very decent SF suspense story, with a fresh premise well executed. I would read a sequel, and I'll look for more from this author.

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Nucleation starts with a very creative and interesting story: The idea of exploring and exploits the universe without truly being there by using quantum entanglement as a way to control droids remotely.

The central character, some sort of those "droid pilot" is obsessive to determine why one of those "trips" went bad, and most of the book is focused on it.

The hard part is that the book doesn't explain the main "magic" and, if I remember well, it doesn't dare to explain what is "quantum entanglement", using all the time the word "entanglement", leaving the "quantum" to the reader. One page of explanation will allow this book to be interesting for nontech people.

Another point that disturbs me in a book is the lack of description of the participants. I don't know the main characters' looks and this makes it hard to imagine the overall setup.

As a sci-fi book, I don't expect any deepness of the players but this book makes all looks flat and without any other emotion except their jobs.

Finally, it seems that the book is part of a series because the ending leaves almost everything open and partially unsolved.

I only can recommend this book by the overall concept but the lack of deep on the characters made me sad. A great idea as this one deserves more details and a tad of passion and humanity.

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I was in a mood for an exciting science fiction adventure. I’d have probably settled for a somewhat entertaining one. But this book…let’s just say if it were a knife, it wouldn’t have cut through warm butter. I mean, I might have had more exciting time watching water boil than I did reading this book. Definitely have had more exciting time watching the cloud amble through the sky. Or just staring at the ceiling. In fact, the main characteristic of this book is its constant consistent lack of any excitement whatsoever. It doesn’t sound right, not when you read the description, not even when you go by individual sentences or paragraphs, but the sum total is torpidly tedious, like someone deliberately washed all the color and joy and fun out of it. Am I being too tough on this book? I don’t think so, I really don’t. It took a large percentage of my day to get through and at no time did it make it worth it. Not once. In fact, the very first chapter was so bland that had I not been such a freaking completist, this would have definitely been put aside and forgotten. But no, I plowed through. Lured in by a promise of a first contact story, which also…surprise, surprise…had got to be the least exciting one of those. There’s tons of tech jargon, meticulous procedural descriptions, loads (way too much) corporate espionage, uncompelling attempts at intrigue and suspense and also…zero excitement, zero fun, zero dynamism, zero wow factor and, notably, zero character development, like not at all, there are just there going through paces but displaying almost no personalities. It’s all so freaking mechanical somehow, technically faultless and strikingly unengaging and lackluster. It’s almost odd in a way, until the author’s bio tells you about her experience as a video game creator. Now I know video games these days are actually supposed to be very advance and indeed engaging, but it really isn’t for me and neither was this book in much the same way. Good graphics, but lifelike at best. If you’re into tech driven video game like science fiction, it might work for you. I wish I had nicer things to say about this book, since I am its first reviewer here on Goodreads. Sure, it has three high ratings, but no one has thought to say a single word about it before me and mine aren’t the most flattering, but this was an compete irredeemable waste of my time. So maybe my review can help someone save theirs. Thank Netgalley.

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