Battlestar Suburbia by Chris McCrudden

I was provided an electronic copy of this book by the publisher.

Well, I am kind of lost for words on this one. It is a book which really, really wasn’t for me. However, many people will like this, I’ll try and be as fair to it as possible.

Battlestar Suburbia is the first book in a series of books. It revolves around Darrren and Kelly, two ‘fleshies’, living in a future where the machines have taken over and instead of the machines serving us, we are serving them. Used as slaves for cleaning duties. Darren, in the tradition of a picaresque novel, accidentally short-circuits a lamppost and sets in motion a series of events. You can imagine where it goes from there, Darren stumbles around from event to event and barely gets by, he’ll still get to be the hero, eventually.

The novel draws an interesting universe, one where the machines are our fearless leaders and humans are reduced to cleaning duties. This is the part I really liked, the world and the initial idea it draws from. Sadly, it is the only part I liked.

Honestly, I just did not like it. There are two things that bothered me especially, the humor and the characters. The novel tried to be funny, the publisher even evokes Douglas Adams on their website, but I just did not find it particularly funny. To be honest, this is miles away from coming even close to Douglas Adams. However, to be fair, I am sure that many people will like the humor, which is certainly present in this book. This is the hard thing about writing funny books, if you don’t like the humor of it, it is pretty much a wasted effort when reading it.

Darren as a main character is just not enough, he’s not much of anything. Not even a proper idiot we can laugh about. The world-building is well executed but the characters lack depth and imagination, these are just flat somethings that miss agency and emotion. So, I neither liked the humor nor the characters, which left me rather unsatisfied.

But as I said, you very much might like the humor. I just can’t recommend it.

The publisher’s website for the book series