Reviews for War Surf

The average rating for War Surf based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-07-17 00:00:00 Jeff Martin picked up this book because I'd recently been going back and reading the Phillip K Dick winners (the annual award for best Sci-Fi in paperback.) This is the 2006 winner and, having just read such GREAT novels as Vacuum Diagrams, Altered Carbon, and Life, I had high expectations. 120 pages in I was ready to put the book down and move on to something else. The book is a mish-mash of clichés, boring stock characters that I found totally unredeeming, and painfully heavy-handed symbolism. There is a germ of a good idea here that I found, at times, enjoyable but it was not worth reading the entire novel. Since there is a summary on the website and in other reviews, we already know who Nasir Deepra and Sheeba are. Nasir is vain and in lust with Sheeba. His friends are bored zillionaires who booze and drug themselves for entertainment. Sheeba is naivé and flakey. Fine. But their personalities are stock and assembled out of such painfully obvious clichés. None of them are painted in a way that is fresh or interesting. Nasir carries a mirror in his pocket which he is constantly pulling out to check his hair with. Anything Sheeba says to him throughout the course of the novel is GUARANTEED to be misinterpreted (there is never ONCE a moment when he doubts himself for going completely the opposite direction with what she says to him.) He gets jealous whenever anybody talks to her in the same way a six year old might. His friends go on benders for days at a time and approach death as though they were watching a cartoon. Sheeba is a physical therapist and is always spouting new age hippy jargon. I found it hard to believe that any of these people could function in ANY society, let alone live for 200+ years, run trillion dollar companies, and "SURF" wars. I'm all for anti-heros (see Altered Carbon) but nothing about the way these characters are written was new or fresh or interesting - and since the book takes 100 pages to get going you're forced to spend 2-3 days with these people that you wouldn't want to spend 10 minutes with in real life. I kept waiting for things to get better and for some actual character development to occur. Sheeba (who might have saved the book had it been written from her perspective) experiences an instant and (as such) inexplicable change "off camera." Nasir's friends never change and by page 336 Nasir himself writes "By now you may have asked yourself...why you keep browsing this memoir. The narrator...has no redeeming traits." 336! Thats 39 pages from the END! Then...he changes. Completely unmotivated. There is no indication as to whether his change is caused by the horrors that he created (to which he'd been completely oblivious to up to that point,) or a (avoiding a spoiler here) third party has caused it. But the change is virtually instant. It occurs in two or three sentences. After spending over 300 pages with these dull idiots I thought, at least, I'd be treated to torturous introspection or grandious revelation. But the pivotal moment was almost arbitrary. Adding insult to boredom was the symbolism, again heavy handed and obvious. Without being too specific, HEAVEN, BLOOD, IMMORTALITY, THE GARDEN. Ugh. There were one or two people that I actually liked in here but their page real estate was too small to be any kind of saving grace. Again the book might have been a LOT more fun if it had been written from Sheeba's perspectve. Then again maybe not. If you're interested in reading some really good sci-fi, check out the last five Philip K Dick winners but...you might want to skip this one.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-18 00:00:00 Danny Darmono I agree mostly with Ian regarding this book. The so-called adults in the novel speak and act like dim-witted teenagers. I thought that this might be the author's point and in some repects the children in the book do act more mature than the adults, but it was just too goofy and painful to read the things these people said and did. I mean food fights, really? The story is just too politically correct and heavy-handed. I wound up skimming pages toward the end just praying to get this over with. I usually don't finish books I don't like, but for some reason, I got through this one. I was always afraid to read this because of the cover, but as someone else indicated, the cover doesn't represent almost anything in the book. It's hard to find good science fiction without relying on the old classics, so people put their trust in these "Award Winners" which is another roll of the dice. There is good and then there is bad. Sorry, this one was bad.