Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.



Mike's literary corollary to Clarke's Third of Prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology that is used without precedent in the story is indistinguishable from bad writing.



This book was first and foremost a disappointment. I loved the premise of the book: a secretive rogue government agency harvests advanced technology before it becomes widespread and disruptive to society and h

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.Mike's literary corollary to Clarke's Third of Prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology that is used without precedent in the story is indistinguishable from bad writing.This book was first and foremost a disappointment. I loved the premise of the book: a secretive rogue government agency harvests advanced technology before it becomes widespread and disruptive to society and humanity.What I got was a story populated exclusively by tropes, little to no innovative story telling, and boring, bland characters. Some spoilers to follow.I fully recognize that tropes cannot be avoided. They are merely recognized conventions writers use. Using them is not a mark of a bad writer, every writer uses them. Even the greatest characters of literature can be boiled down to a trope. What differentiates good writers from bad ones is the ability to breathe life into the tropes, giving them unique twists or interpretation.Influx is populated by characters that barely rise to the level of trope. There is the rebel scientist who refuses to cooperate with the rogue government organization, the wise mentor he learns from in captivity, the power hungry antagonist, the beautiful enemy agent that is converted to the hero's cause. I just couldn't care about all of them and it seemed like the author did not either.There were plenty of opportunities to explore the characters' deeper motivations or perspective on events that . For instance, near the end of the book, our hero is infiltrating the bad guys' secret base and runs across his old mentor who had apparently decided to cooperate with the bad guys. Instead of providing a passage of text to describe the mentor's reaction to seeing his old pupil and the revelation the pupil bestows upon him, he gets a few pages of story before getting ignobly offed. Personally I was actually interested to see how the mentor would have reacted to having lived under a significant lie for many years and the consequences of his actions. Instead he is treated as a disposable character. By the end of the book I was just skimming pages during the climatic showdown between the various heroes and villains; I just didn't care.I also thought the author relies much too heavily on "advanced technology" out of nowhere. It did literally verge on the edge of magic. Obviously I am aware of Clarke's third law (see above). But there is a difference between introducing advanced technology in a natural way and having it appear out of left field. For instance, early in the book we are shown that the shadowy government agency has access to fusion technology. When it is shown later in the book, it is not a surprise. When the bad guys literally summon a golem to chase the hero I am pretty sure I heard my suspension of disbelief shatter. If that sort of technology was introduced as a possibility earlier I would have been less critical, instead of viewing it as "I, the writer, need some way to get around this obstacle to where I want the story to go". It is as though Chekhov's gun went off in a play that took place in ancient Rome: I was surprised both that it went off and that it existed in the first place.Because I was so indifferent to the story and the characters, I noticed a fair amount of little things that were just wrong. The military force that ends up trying to attack the bad guy's headquarters is described as the 82nd airborn division, but it shown having lots of heavy main battle tanks. It doesn't take a genius (or someone with access to google) to know that airborne forces don't have a heavy tank forces. The author also demonstrated a distinct lack of knowledge of just how much energy a megawatt was, stating several times that a small amount of them (60 MW in one case) was enough to power a small city. As someone who works in the energy field I can assure you that a small city has a much higher power requirement than 60 MW. Perhaps if the story was better and the characters more engaging I could overlook this mistakes, but they weren't so I didn't.On a side note, the whole gravity manipulation to fly and do other neat things was done first and much, MUCH, better by Brandon Sanderson in the Stormlight Archives . He had the benefit of also having complex and interesting chaarcters as well.On a second side note, this book merely showed to me that the sort of technologies the rogue government organization was keeping away from the population as a whole was a good thing. The amount of destruction they were able to unleash with them (summoned golem, giant gravity weapons, guns that use anti-matter) strongly convinced me that they were doing the world a service. That level of destruction in the hands of unstable or nefarious organizations would be unfathomable. While I couldn't root for the bad guys at the end (because they had gone full Skeletor evil), I did see the value of their organization's stated goals.On a final side note, there were several splinter factiosn from the main evil organization. What happens once the main evil organization is wiped out? I don't know, and the author certainly doesn't give them a second thoght (or really explore them much at all, much to my further chagrin).At the end of the day this struck me as a very poor execution of a neat and fascinating idea. Poorly developed characters abounded and easily mingled with lazy tropes masquerading as characters. The story wasn't gripping since there always seemed to be an easy "advanced technology" solution to any problem the hero or villain faced. By the end I was just angry that the book had wasted the potential of the premise with such terrible writing.