Fractal Noise Reviews
Jun. 1st, 2025 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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antishurtugal_rebornOne of the Most Pointless Books I’ve Ever Read
Reviewed in the United States on 17 May 2023
This book was an exercise in perseverance. I wanted to DNF this book so badly, but I stubbornly refused because of his previous book, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. Believe me when I say the two works could not be further apart in terms of quality and depth.
This book was largely filler, and it shows quite evidently. It was a work of philosophy, nihilism and a product of the author’s ego. This is a book that a responsible agent should have shelved and it should have remained unpublished. It adds absolutely nothing to the series — it is completely pointless in almost any meaningful measure and in no way resembles his previous FractalVerse book.
I do not enjoy writing negative reviews and I had such high hopes from this book considering the author’s previous works but this was one of the worst things I’ve ever read. The author made me question whether I wanted to continue down the rabbit hole with him and continue purchasing his books. A work of substance, this was not. Do yourself a favor, read To Sleep in a Sea of Stars instead (which I consider one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time, now that was a masterpiece). Don’t waste your money or energy with this, it fails almost completely on every level. If you have to, consider taking it out on loan from a library before deciding to purchase it as a forever placeholder on your bookshelf.
Disappointing, poor character and story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2024
I wanted to like this book having another of the author's but it disappointed on so many levels. Most of the characters were two dimensional and formulaic. The story has many points where you think that the characters are doing things people would not do. It turns into one man's inner dialogue about his obsession with his dead girlfriend.
A Painful Slog for Both Characters and Readers
Reviewed in the United States on 17 March 2024
I really, REALLY loved To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. I pre-ordered this book and waited patiently for it to be released. This book did much more than disappoint me. It was horrendous. Halfway through I gave up, then I came back to it a few months later and tried to soldier on until the end. DONT WASTE YOUR TIME! There's no end to this book. Nothing happens. So many big, important questions are asked and NONE of them are answered. If you read the epilogue you figure out why. This was a dream the author had and that's pretty much it. Not a whole lot of thought went into it. THIS WAS TERRIBLE. I'll never get another book from this author again.
Maybe it’s just me.
Reviewed in the United States on 17 June 2023
I could not finish. Alex is the biggest whiner in the entire universe. I was thoroughly sick of the entire crew a quarter of the way in. I’m glad Layla is dead and cremated. I hope Alex suffers a permanent bout of shingles coupled with severe dysentery and is left alone to creep through deep space at a snail’s pace in a dead ship with only the sound of the ship brain, endlessly repeating, “Poor Alex, poor Alex, poor Alex”until he dies an excruciating and prolonged death. I hope the ship brain suffers an aneurysm and a cataclysmic breach in the hull that blows the rest of the crew out into deep space just as they sit for dinner. In time, I hope they are all pulled into a massive star and disposed of properly so that no human, alien, or artificial intelligence ever has to suffer their pity parties, whining, and anti-Christian rants again… EVER.
what even is this story?
Reviewed in the United States on 19 February 2024
This story is the printed equivalent of a truck stop egg salad sandwich. I regret finishing it, and I'm certain it's going to come back to bother me later.
The characters are one note, the backdrop of Talos starts interestingly but fizzles out, Alex never comes to any deeper understanding of life, grief, or the human condition. Do not recommend this Walmart version of Heart of Darkness.
Paolini Disappoints
Reviewed in the United States on 23 May 2023
I’m an avid fan of Christopher Paolini’s writing and have every book he’s written. Sadly, this is the first time I feel like I wasted my money on a book. The story is fragmented, it doesn’t go anywhere, it has sexist undertones, and isn’t the brilliant escapist, fantasy reading I’ve done to expect from him. He wrote this story was inspired by a dream, and it should have stayed a dream.
After that I jumped over to Goodreads, who were typically a lot more merciless. Seems a good number of the bad reviews were over the AI generated cover, so I just ignored those ones.
94 reviews23 followers
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I finished the book and yet I have no idea what this book was supposed to be about.
Stories set in isolated, cut-off settings hold a different place in sci-fi space and I haven't seen any other book make a complete hash of it. The characters are unbearable. For being specialized scientists, there is zero science and exploration of the hole. All we have is constant bickering of the characters or moping of the protagonist. For an interesting premise, the book delivered no answers or plot movements. Nothing at all. Instead, it went into repeated philosophical debates and answers to life that were out of place. 300+ pages of reading to know that the way to living is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. *smh*
One of the most disappointing reads of the year.
331 reviews4 followers
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This is one of the most tedious novels I've ever read in my life, and I've read many... There is no story as such, just dull characters blabbering on and on as they reach their destination. Nothing worthwhile happens and nothing worthwhile is said. This novel is not even vaguely bearable if you skim through it. Characters are a most tiresome bunch, the usual astronaut who mourns his dead wife and has lost the will to live, the tough guy, the geek, the religious fanatic (a woman, of course!). In other words, you just do NOT want to hear what they have to say. On an even sadder note, one of them - called Pushkin - is an offensive caricature of an "Eastern European" who speaks in broken English. This was really the last straw.
Author 8 books180 followers
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A lot of one star reviews for this book are flat out review bombing. I don't engage in such a practice myself. But while I did give this book a fair shake, I was absolutely not impressed. Even leaving aside the utter ridiculousness of Tor being caught using AI to create the cover art (allegedly by accident, since they simply took from a normally reputable stock photo source, so they said) and Paolini defending it against deserved backlash, this book just doesn't deserve the hype. Paolini said in his afterword that he tried to write this one after finishing the old Inheritance Cycle, and that his initial draft was way too bleak and nihilistic, so he moved on to To Sleep in a Sea of Stars instead. If only he'd left Fractal Noise to molder away in the slush pile of oblivion, because this book belongs there. It's short, but plodding, dull, unfunny (most of the attempted humor comes from a really obnoxious Slavic stereotype named Pushkin who speaks in broken English like a side character on NCIS: Los Angeles, and most of the other characters run on sci-fi stereotypes as well, with a protagonist in mourning, a hyper religious teammate, etc. etc.) While I was never a big fan of Paolini, at least his previous works had heart. This one...let's just say I would be unsurprised if the AI was limited to just the cover. I suspect a lot of the inner artwork might've been AI as well, and there could've been some touch ups the editor might've run on the text, if not Paolini himself. I hate to speculate but...who knows. All I know is, I gave this one a shot and I found this book wanting for even a hint of enjoyment.
61 reviews2 followers
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This is a terrible book. Don't read!
There, how's that for a review? I can't remember the last time I've been so uninspired by a book as I was by this one. I've read other books by Paolini and really enjoyed them which is why I picked this one up, but Hooh-boy!....what a stinker this one is. When a good idea goes bad it's so disappointing and this tale is a perfect example. Here Paolini is an author who has nothing interesting to say and is unable to take the story anywhere.
A starship detects a perfectly circular, cylindrical hole, obviously built by someone of advanced intelligence, on an otherwise barren planet, 50 kilometers wide and of unknown depth. It's also emitting an extremely powerful, perfectly consistent EMP pulse, again for no apparent purpose, other than it's at a frequency exactly equivalent to the Mandelbrot set. (Fractals, get it?) A mystery! Sounds like a promising premise for a book but unfortunately, the story literally goes nowhere and the mystery never gets solved.
Each of the four crew members selected to investigate this anomaly has, what can be politely called, "issues". One is a religious fanatic who's been put in charge of the mission for some unknown reason other than the fact that she's an astrophysicist. There's a burly, snarky geologist, a mild-mannered chemist and the main protagonist, a Xenobiologist who's miserable and grieving because his wife was killed and he's feeling guilt and remorse for a whole host of reasons. There are many reasons why all of these people should never even be a member of the starship's crew let alone selected for what could be a dangerous, historic and rewarding away mission but that's what happens. It makes one think that the captain who selected these people for the mission is an imbecile!
So, we have these four flawed characters who have to make a trek on foot, for days on end, from their lander to the hole, all the while being blasted with a fierce headwind and the EMP that gets more and more powerful the closer they get to the hole. What can go wrong? The answer is pretty much everything, but the main problem is that we keep reading, hoping for an answer to "what's in the hole" but all we get is 280-some pages of angst, grief, misery and incessant yammering about pretty much nothing very important other than the question, do all intelligent beings appreciate art and boo-hoo, someone's wife was killed by an alien animal on some other stupid planet humans shouldn't be on. It's all a lotta B.S. with nothing meaningful to learn.
What a shame and what a disappointment. I'm pissed off that I wasted my time and if there's a Book #2 where all is revealed, I'll pass.
Note: I just looked at one of my previous reviews of Paolini's books, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars and realized that's Fractalverse #1. This book is Fractalverse #0, so is it a prequel? If it is, it makes no sense whatsoever.
41 reviews
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What a disappointment. Heading into this book I had SUCH high hopes for a good solid, sci-fi novel. I wanted “the meeting the unknown”, first contact, psychological slow burn sort of sci-fi and it seemed like this would fit the bill… well I was wrong. This book teases that in the beginning and spends the entire length heading towards a premise that is NEVER realized. Frankly, the author needs an absolution for the way this book both deceived and disappointed me.
There is no intrigue, there is no mystery.. there is barely a plot. It’s all a sham in the end, and when you throw in lackluster writing and genuinely horrible characters.. there really is nothing left to enjoy. And the characters, oh my.. what an awful bunch. Part absurd, at times borderline detestable - their motivations make no sense, they’re all unprofessional and petulant.. just overall unpleasant. Especially the main character Alex, whose depression and suicidal ideation was enough to drag me down further with each passing chapter. Then there’s the plot, which is borderline non-sensical.. none of this would ever be allowed to happen.
It’s like the plot of a book revolving around how a guy just walks into the white house, walks up to the Oval Office and takes a selfie with the president. It’s that level of absurdity.., in what is supposed to be a science fiction novel. Just what a letdown.. reading this book is like forcing yourself to eat a plate of cold fries. You knew it could have been so much better, and yet it’s just so bad and almost unbearable to stomach.
192 reviews33 followers
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I've slogged through over half of this book so I think I'm entitled to call it quits.
This book is just awful. There's no other way to put it. It's not enough to say that it 'lacks subtlety'. Rather, there is no way that you could use the idea of subtlety as a reference point for this book. The characters are bland - particularly bad is the loud, stereotyped Russian who can't speak proper English.
The main character's only defining characteristic is that he's constantly depressed about the fact that his partner (who has no defining characteristics at all) has carked it. Want to know how I figured that out? Because every second line is "I'm depressed because my partner died". I wish I was exaggerating.
As for the so-called 'philosophy' in this book. I think it's safe to assume Paolini has not really read any philosophy or theology - his writing is embarrassingly uninformed.
I have two words for people thinking of reading this: Don't bother.
50 reviews
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A 1 seems harsh for a book that I fully finished but I really struggled through it. 1.5 then.
These characters are not likable and not happy, and that really made the reading experience feel like a slog. The main character Alex is a depressed widower who is CONSTANTLY bringing up his late wife to the point where I was just sick of the guy's perspective. And as you meet other characters they turn out to be just as haunted and messed up as he is, if not more. There's no enthusiasm or excitement about the exploration, the vibe of the entire team is more like desperation and recklessness.
Their incredibly dangerous and unpleasant journey really didn't make sense to me. They're taking outrageous risks and the reasons are not clear. Curiosity and To make history feel like dumb reasons to go through everything that these characters have to face and still decide again and again to carry on.
You should know going into this that the book is entirely about the journey. I kept reading and waiting to see what was in the dang hole and I feel like this is more a warning than a spoiler: that happens at the Very End. There is a distinct lack of payoff.
I don't see what this brings to the table in this fractal verse universe. This book is definitely not required reading to enjoy the next. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars felt like a stretch for me because of the fantasy elements, but it kept me interested for hundreds of pages. This one was more conventional science fiction, and I just really wasn't into it. If it had been more than 300 pages I would have dropped it after the first 75.
27 reviews2 followers
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This was the second book I've read from Paolini, the first one being my favourite among SCIFI books: To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars (TSIASOS). So I can only do 1:1 comparisons, which can be unfair for the author.
Fractal Noise is an annoying read. The storyline feels like a short, but it's a long dreaded read with repetitive sequences - dream-state, endless whining and bickering and whatnot. Totally the opposite of TSIASOS.
I saw people giving bad ratings to this book because of the AI art, and after reading it, I can't help myself to be in the same wagon. I feel the author is being lazy with his writing and doesn't seem to care about his readers.
17 reviews
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Paolini was the first trad pub author w/a genAI cover.
I blame him for the uptick of genAI covers.
I blame him for gaslighting us.
I blame him for not standing up for the artists he said he loves so much.
I blame him for not pushing back on his publisher because 'it would push back my release by a year and all the $$ I would lose (yet he was just signed to do a series w/Disney... so...)
His publisher (and him) flat-out admitted it was genAI, but that they don't care because it won't affect their profits enough to matter (and disabled comments/responses on every platform).
I refuse to support Paolini, and he goes into the dumpster w/all the other problematic authors that I used to love.
Interestingly, right now Paolini is tweeting a lot of very firmly anti-AI stuff, including saying that he won’t use it for research or anything else. He even went so far as to say ship minds are workable but not unsupervised ship AIs. A response to this backlash, maybe?
