A couple of weeks ago I read the first book of the ‘Themis Files’ trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel and was blown away by the original story. In some cases I find that sequels to an original story might not be bad but have a hard time reaching the same level of storytelling and content of the previous book. So I was wondering how it would be in this case.
The second book of the trilogy, ‘Waking Gods’ continues where the first book ended. 10 years later, another giant alien robot suddenly appears in London and just sits there, doing nothing for a few days. People are getting nervous and start doing stupid things and things pretty much start going downhill from there. The storytelling is quite the opposite, however, and I had an even harder time putting this book down than the first one. I’m glad that I started reading the book during a few days vacation so I didn’t have to compromise on my sleeping hours to finish the book.
I won’t go further into the details of the plot but suffice it to say that after the first third of the book it become obvious that this is not going down utopia way. In general, I don’t like dystopian science fiction so I’m glad things only started to turn this way in the second book as I would otherwise not have picked up the first book in the first place. But there is still some hope and I’ll let you decide for yourself if the ending is more utopian or dystopian. Like the first book, the end is sort of a cliffhanger but the story has enough of a closure to wait a few days before going for the final volume in the trilogy.