3 out of 5

I enjoyed Starfish.

At any given point – set the book down – I was not compelled to read it.

But pick it back up, and I enjoyed it, and would keep reading until I wouldn’t.  This approval / dismissal cycle ping-pinged in my head while trying to decipher my feelings on the title; I want to read more in this Rifters series – Starfish being the first book, and Watts’ first book – but it doesn’t ring true as a recommendation.  The book works in much the same way as it is constructed – loose, science-backed concepts that weave through psychology (via its character studies) but never quite settling on a focus…  Until it does.  50 pages out.  To be continued.

And so, I suspect / hope, it is the Rifters series that will be worthy of shout outs, with this first entry being the requisite first rough step to understand how it all started.

Which is a tough sell, but let’s wrap back around: I enjoyed Starfish.  We prelude with an undersea tour of ‘The Rift’ – a deep-sea region under no-one-knows-why construction by our tomorrow-future corporate overlord stand-ins, the Global Authority.  Key concepts are introduced: Smart gels, i.e. “thinking” networks which are slowly but surely getting work outside of the internet virus disinfection for which they were originally designed; body modifications; data streamed into a virtual display via contacts; and then the Rifters: those tasked with living in those Rift stations for extended periods, all artificialed-up with inner machinery and external doodads to let them exist and function outside of the station.

Exploring the Rifters is Starfish’s bread and butter.  It’s also where the book goes royally astray for a few hundred pages, indulging Watts’ curiosities regarding the exact type of mentality that would be suited to this isolated work.  Mainly we hang with the cold Lennie Clarke, but we might also spend time with chilly Acton, or brisk Brander, or icy Alice…  Characters are explored in a roundabout fashion, in other words, developed by rebounding them off their surroundings as opposed to narrating them, and the book takes the same approach with its plot, which eventually evolves into…  Nah, I’ll let you take that trip.

Starfish began as a short and expanded to novel, and that, I think, is what we’re witnessing: A writer getting more and more amped up about what he’s creating as he creates it.  The real-world grounding of the book is equally thrilling and disturbing, like all great speculative sci-fi; its psychological musings less so, but only because of their various blind alleys: Odd relationships and character arcs explored and abandoned.  It’s a whole bunch if Interesting in pursuit of a cause, keeping it enjoyably readable – if maybe not exactly a page turner – until it finds its cause and plops us into a perfect position to need to know more.