Loved this.
Its science-fiction and is written by debut author Gavin Chait who is according to his blog, a data scientist in his day-job with degrees in Microbiology, Biochemistry and Mechanical Engineering. Certainly the science of this futuristic novel seems solid to me and perfectly believable.
It isn’t a militaristic science fiction story like Ancillary Justice which I reviewed in June 2016; it’s more like the Man Who Fell to Earth, a kind of aliens-fall-to-earth-bearing-gifts tale. Set in West Africa deep in oil-rich Nigeria sometime in the 22nd Century in an age when there is no demand for oil, it centres on what happens when a starship lands near a remote village close to the border with Cameroon. The pilot is injured but the villagers manage not only to rescue and aid him but also hide all traces of his ship and his presence from marauding local Warlords. It is a brilliant set-up and although the narrative meanders a little and as most other reviewers observe, is a little too long, I never at any stage got bored. One reviewer on Goodreads says the aliens-fall-to-earth-bearing-gifts tale is ‘hoary’. Well, not to me it isn’t. Another complains that Chait adopts every sci-fi ‘chestnut’ ever written: again, how would I know, I almost never read Science Fiction. I loved the fact that it was rooted in a believable future post-oil world but with many other features that could credibly be invented or developed in the next thousand years: AI of course; longevity [most of the characters are 150-years old] and 3D printing to name just some.
It is a first novel and okay you shouldn’t make allowances for that, it isn’t expected and why should you qualify your review to accommodate miss-steps of structure or concatenation. Not that there are many of those: the stories and ballads do slow the pace . . . there are far too many . . . although I appreciate that he is trying to get away from writing just a Boys Own adventure story into something a little more profound and African. I think it does suffer slightly from first-novel-itis insofar as there are too many characters and threads; as though Chait expects this to be his once-only book and wants to pack into it every idea he ever had. But I didn’t find that a problem: what I did find a problem were all the African names; Aicha and Aisha and Asachai . . . and that was just the A’s. Each short chapter takes a different POV and by the time Aisha came round again, I couldn’t remember if she was his daughter or his mistress.
It is currently number 31131 in Amazon’s Science Fiction & Fantasy best-seller lists, which is disappointing; it has average of 4* on Amazon and 3* on Goodreads, the two-star ‘hoary’ review has hurt its rankings. It is published by Doubleday. Doubleday is Transworld's more literary hardcover imprint, publishing authors including Kate Atkinson, Rachel Joyce, Joanna Trollope and Joanne Harris, so it is hard to justify comments that it isn’t well-written. They would have published under a different imprint if they were unsure of the writing quality.
They should get the Marketing Department to give it a push, nominate it for some awards. Perhaps when it is issued in paperback it will do better. It is very good.
![Lament for the Fallen by [Gavin Chait]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61B9aLTLCGL._SY346_.jpg)
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KIKAREN
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