I’ve just, finally, finished “God’s War” by Kameron Hurley. Hurley does some interesting things in this book, and a lot of things that start off looking interesting but end up being good costuming for well-worn tropes, but ultimately I felt she wrote well, had some interesting ideas, but not a story I enjoyed much. I didn’t especially care for it because by the end I didn’t feel that either plot or character had completed a journey that I found worth the extreme abuse that the reader is dragged through via the characters.
It is a science-fantasy world dominated by women (most of the men are sent to the front in a never-ending war, most of them never come home), bugs (which do everything from transmit messages to power vehicles), magicians (whose greatest powers are in controlling the bugs), and violence (lacking men, the women have to do everything from box to bounty-hunt, most of it in exceedingly brutal fashion). The main character is a bounty-hunter of sorts, and it turns that a desperate, violent, woman ends up boring me just as much as a desperate, violent, man. The jacket blurb suggests that she might be able to end the war, but the actual plot is far more sordid and less soaring than that would suggest (perhaps that was the point). I slogged through to the end hoping for redemption, but what the author gave seemed pretty weak to me—opportunities to do things differently, but no indication (in my reading) that the characters would actually do much differently. In some ways it reminded me of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, after all that misery….. the whole cycle might just start over again?
Having said that, there are a lot of reviewers who liked this book, and there is certainly good stuff in here, and at the least having a female dominated novel is different from much of science fiction, so if you like characters who win by being able to take more punishment than the other guy or worlds in which nobody even thinks much about right and wrong anymore, you may really like this book. It wasn’t for me, but I think there are people who will enjoy it.