Just finished Fractal Noise. There was a bunch of controversy about that cover, apparently, which I was only aware of now in Googling around about the book to find the image. I don’t know what to say about all that, but I can say that the cover is extremely distracting. The entire book is about these people that find this big ass hole on some planet and go check it out. The cover makes it look like a portal or something. Upright. The hole is not upright. It’s a hole. In the ground. Like if you’re going to AI the cover, maybe just keep trying stuff until it reflects, ya know, what’s actually going on in the book.

I found the writing pretty good. There is very compelling world building happening. It’s a few hundred years in the future and mankind has spread out a bit and we’ve run into some aliens already have some protocols, but it’s all still fairly new to us. That’s a great premise.

The actual story is kinda boring. Some dude misses his girl friend a bunch, who was mauled by some literal space tiger, but that’s not a metaphor or relevant in any way, it’s just how she died. Could have been whatever, but nope, space tiger.

This dude is one of 4 who are chosen from this ship to go check out a hole on a planet. The hole is pretty big. The hole spits out sound every 10.6 seconds (or something like that). Don’t worry, you’ll know, because:

THUD.

The book literally does that every few paragraphs to remind you. I found it distracting (which was maybe the point?). The thudding gets more and more powerful as they get closer to the hole, like a beating drum getting more and more dramatic. But the story itself doesn’t get all that much more dramatic. Sure, tension and stakes rise a bit, but it just wasn’t going anywhere. Then it’s just over. To absolutely ruin it for you: you learn nothing about the hole. Still just hole. Aliens probably built it. For something. They were probably smart, but hard to say. Also: it’s demanding to walk really far on a barren alien landscape. Sometimes people get on each other’s nerves and disagree and even fight. The end.

Wanna know what the thudding was? That you literally read like hundreds of times in the book? Sorry, no.

Still, I’d maybe read another book in this world because I dug that part.

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