Reset: A Novel

Great story, and an interesting world.

This book started promisingly, but got a bit detailed in the amorous encounters, which didn’t interest me a bit, so I left this one halfway finished.

The concept of this novel is intriguing and asks an interesting dystopian question, but the writing is cumbersome and at times just moves in the surface too long. The narrator is fine but I don’t find the “R-dropping affectation” charming. Others might.

Lovely story. Good sci-fi with a big dose of romance

I liked many aspects of this book. The premise is original (or at least uncommon), the setting is reasonably impressive, the dialogue is mostly solid, and there's an interesting mystery to unravel as to what is going on behind the scenes. There are also some issues. One is that people who have reason to worry about being followed are easily followed over and over, including swaps between who is tailing whom. I would forgive that, since the world is a setting in which real danger is almost unheard of, but the reasons for following people rarely make sense. A character will just decide that "it doesn't make sense" that another would being going here or doing this, even though they typically don't know each other very well and have no reason to think so. On more than one occasion, outright guesses as to where someone might be turn out to be correct for no discernable reason except to allow the following to serve the plot. Smart people can seduce things from clues, but the characters as often as not give no indication that they are doing anything out of the ordinary for their actual personas, while those following them become suspicious for little or no reason given anything revealed in the text. This becomes more prevalent and problematic as the story progresses. Meanwhile, nearly the whole tale hinges on one character's extremely unlikely attachment to another: having expressly never gone on second dates to avoid attachment, Aris suddenly forms a very strong and lasting entanglement with Benja, a thoroughly unlikeable, manipulative narcissist who began her to stay with him as he berates, insults, and denigrates her for disagreeing with his behavior. Her desire to avoid attachment, it seems, meant simply not having sex with the same person twice, but totally letting a random guy take over her life, bullying her into making as promise she knows full-well she can't possibly keep and then leaving her wallowing in guilt for the predictable outcome. Worse, once this incredibly irritating character who was indifferent to anything but himself exits, he inflates to sainthood in the unreliable memory of Aris, who payments his loss as a social catastrophe and pines for him in a level I've never known to be associated with losing even a good friend, much less one who demanded much and gave little. Those are the only two issues, the latter being much more significant than the former, and they don't keep the book from being worth reading. I even thought there were some interesting insights regarding why secret groups tend to crumble when strained. I recommend "Reset," but I will not be reading the sequels. I think there is enough resolution here to leave things where they are, like the settlement between the Architect and the Oracle in the Matrix movies.