I usually don’t write about books of which I did not quite enjoy and thus I would not have written about ‘Only Human‘ by Sylvain Neuvel if I had not written about the two earlier books of the trilogy ‘Sleeping Giants‘ and ‘Waking Gods‘ before. I already noted in the first blog entry on the trilogy, I don’t very much enjoy dystopian science fiction. After reading the first book, things were still o.k., the story line about discovering a huge robot from another world and making it work again was incredibly good science fiction. Things already changed in the second part as more robots appear and things got much less peaceful but I was hoping for some more utopia rather than dystopia in the final part of the trilogy.
Unfortunately I was disappointed, part 3 is about as dystopian as you can get and the references to today’s racism, war, refugee crises and other problems of mankind are just a few millimeters below the surface. Coating the storyline with a bit of science fiction didn’t help and I rather raced through the book skipping entire pages to get it done and over with instead of enjoying the read. In hindsight, I should have stopped reading after the first book, as the story line changes from a focus on science fiction and utopia to utter dystopia. So that’s obviously a very personal opinion and from what I see elsewhere other people seem to have enjoyed the read.