Kill the Sun - Review - Mixed feelings
So, I just finished reading this novel, and I have pretty mixed feelings about it.
I'll start by saying I think the first third of the novel is great, especially the beginning. The world-building, the characters, the writing, everything felt so visceral and real. Some parts actually made me feel ill. While I do think the misery became a bit too much at times, I was okay with it because the world these people live in IS miserable.
Nick, as the main character, could be frustrating at times, but he still felt like a real person. Even though he was flawed and morally inconsistent, it was very interesting watching his journey.
My problems started around the end of the Crimson City arc and the beginning of the Liaison arc (I don't know if people actually divide it into arcs, but that's how I see it).
Nick's morals and ethics were always inconsistent, which made sense considering his background. He feels bad for people and wants to do good, but he also doesn't really think twice when he's asked to do something terrible, whether it's out of necessity or not. My problem is that the narrative kind of stops challenging his ideals after the first third of the novel.
I remember his conversation with Albert, and I thought Albert made some very valid points about how it isn't morally right to build the happiness of many on the backs of an innocent few. Nick doesn't even seem to seriously consider what Albert is saying.
Nick basically ends up arguing that the ends justify the means, which feels like the opposite of how he started. At the beginning, he cared deeply about individual suffering and wanting to fix that. I'm not even saying one viewpoint is right and the other is wrong. My issue is that, from this point on, Nick is almost never challenged again. His worldview stays mostly static, and I think that removes one of the biggest things that made the story so interesting. This becomes even more egregious in the final third, after he becomes a Specter.
I understand that the situation is basically impossible because of the aliens and everything else. But that's exactly what made it less interesting to me. The more the world expanded, the less anything seemed to really matter.
From that point on, the story became kind of boring. Nick was basically a machine going through the motions to save a faceless humanity. The writing completely stopped caring about psychological struggle or moral discussions.
Nick impregnates women (with their consent, at least, if that even matters in this context) with psychopath babies, performs experiments on fetuses, kills and tortures millions of people, and yet the author no longer seems interested in exploring how any of that affects Nick or anyone else. The narrative simply places him in the "he's justified" position. Even if his actions make sense within this universe, it just isn't compelling storytelling anymore.
You can also really feel the author getting tired of the novel during the final part. The chapters become shorter and shorter until they're basically footnotes summarizing events.
And don't even get me started on the ending.
This is supposed to be the culmination of thousands of years of suffering, planning, and sacrifice, and we get maybe ten short chapters of actual fight with the aliens. Before that, there's a rushed lead-up of around 30 chapters where the author tries to introduce what are supposed to be major characters and important concepts, but nothing is given enough time to breathe or develop.
So when humanity basically wins with almost no fanfare, I felt... nothing.
I don't know these people. I don't really care about them. It's incredibly difficult to make readers emotionally invested in the abstract concept of humanity. Even in real life, that's something we struggle with. That's why stories need actual people and relationships that give humanity a face.
By the end, the only person we care about left is Nick. But is he really Nick?
For me, Nick actually died when he became a Specter. After that, we were just following his husk. Maybe that was the point the author wanted to make, that at that stage Nick had become nothing more than a machine driven by a single goal. But whether that was intentional or not, it was simply boring to read.
Then there's the clone twist near the end.
First of all, that's a wild thing to introduce at the eleventh hour. More importantly, it just felt cheap. It felt like the author wanted to give Nick a clean slate as a reward.
What I actually wanted was to see the clone develop as his own person. That sounded far more interesting to me. Watching him deal with memories that weren't really his and build his own identity could have been fascinating.
Instead, we basically get two chapters before the clone is like, "Actually, I'm Nick Dusk now." The end.
And that epilogue... holy hell. Harry Potter levels of bad epilogues.
It's basically just, humanity conquers everything, Nick ascends/becomes a god or whatever, and everyone lives happily ever after.
I honestly think the ending needed at least another 300 chapters, especially considering how short the chapters had become by that point. And the clone switch should've happened much earlier as well.
I also think the story desperately needed more compelling side characters. We started off so well, but the last one I found genuinely interesting was the Technician, and after that, nobody really stood out. The world started feeling much smaller and less interesting.
Overall, I really loved the first third of the novel, liked parts of the second, and found the last third to be a huge disappointment.
But that's just my opinion. I'd genuinely love to hear what everyone else thought because I know this novel is very well regarded, and I'm curious to see how other people interpreted it.