The Darwin Elevator
The Darwin Elevator by Jason M. Hough
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, this was a heckuva read. Solidly built world, you can see it — practically smell it. Yeah, it takes a little while to fill the picture in, but really from the get-go you have a pretty clear idea what this particular distopia is like.

But it’s more than just another distopian novel about survival — thankfully. Actually, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what kind of SF novel this is without giving away everything, because every now and then — just when you think you have an idea what kind of book this is going to be, and what’s going on and what’s going to happen — Hough comes along, slaps you upside the head and says, “Nope, not that,” and proceeds to pull the rug out from underneath you. Characters you think you’ll be spending time with for the trilogy are killed. Constants turn out to be temporary. The shifts in direction aren’t such to give you whiplash, but it is enough to make you rethink everything you’ve read/predicted up to that point.

At some point, I started to mentally fill out one of those AD&D alignment grids for the characters — with 2 exceptions (and I guess you could make the argument for another one or two) they’re all some sort of “Neutral.” A couple of “Neutral Good”s, one “Neutral Evil,” (and of course, the exceptions — one “Lawful Good” and one “Chaotic Evil” (or “Total D*ck”), but on the whole, everyone is “Neutral”, just out to survive. Maybe find a little comfort and fun, but mostly just trying to survive in this uncertain world. Which is no mean feat.

It’s that need to survive that creates most of the conflict, most of the motivation for characters — and makes the whole thing so compelling. Almost every decision becomes a matter of life or death — sometimes for the person making the decision, sometimes for large groups of people, occasionally for the human race.

In the end, I think more questions were raised than were answered — but I didn’t feel cheated by any means, it wasn’t that Hough bit off more than he could chew, or left a lot of red (or potentially red) herrings laying around. Nope. He answered questions, he resolved plotlines, saw characters through their arcs. And those answers, resolutions and arcs led organically to new ones. The way it should be. He didn’t end things on a cliffhanger, but there’s almost no way someone could read that last line and not get impatient waiting for the sequel.