Review: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

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Series : Themis Files #1
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Edition : Paperback (320 pages)
Publisher: Penguin (April 26, 2016)
Genre: Science Fiction

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Synopsis

Deadwood, USA. A girl sneaks out just before dark to ride her new bike. Suddenly, the ground disappears beneath her. Waking up at the bottom of a deep pit, she sees an emergency rescue team above her. The people looking down see something far stranger…

“We always look forward. We never look back.”

That girl grows up to be Dr. Rose Franklyn, a brilliant scientist and the leading world expert on what she discovered. An enormous, ornate hand made of an exceptionally rare metal, which predates all human civilisation on the continent.

“But this thing … it’s different. It challenges us. It rewrites history.”

An object whose origins and purpose are perhaps the greatest mystery humanity has ever faced. Solving the secret of where it came from – and how many more parts may be out there – could change life as we know it.

“It dares us to question what we know about ourselves.”

But what if we were meant to find it? And what happens when this vast, global puzzle is complete…?

“About everything.”

My review of Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants is the start of the Themis Files trilogy, a sweeping tale of power, family, alien robots, and what it might mean to be human. A Team made up of a physicist, a former army pilot, a linguist, a psychopathic geneticist, and a mysterious interviewer try to unravel the secrets of a giant alien robot.

Plot and Pacing

The story is told entirely through secret files, containing mission logs and transcripts of interviews with the various characters investigating the robot whose hand Rose Franklin stumbles across as a child. We never learn who is conducting the interviews, but he’s about 80% dry humour, 15% manipulative and 5% strangely likeable. It’s a format I really enjoy, especially in science-fiction, but I have to say that the full cast audiobook made it so much easier to follow the story, keep characters apart and get a sense of their personality. The format lends itself to audio narration incredibly well.

However, there were still sequences of events in the story that slightly confused me, but overall the book does a great job of conveying action through dialogue only. It’s certainly an impressive feat, to juggle a complex cast of characters and various plot threads without the help of the classic third-person narrator. Additionally, the interviews and logs create an immersive sense of urgency and make for great pacing, I was immediately drawn into the world of these characters and how the events would unfold.

Characters

Sleeping Giants is definitely a character-driven story which is probably exactly my kind of sci-fi, I just really like people! Every character felt nuanced and complex and seeing the drastically different personalities clash helped bring out the central questions of the story. What does it mean to be human? Who can be trusted with power? Can humanity work together? Rose Franklin especially contemplates the ethics of her work on the robot, despite being in love with the scientific discoveries. Overall, this proved to be an interesting moral throughline that the book returns to over and over again, as political conflicts over the robot ensue and the dangers of so much power become more apparent.

My second favourite character has to be Kara Resnik, a former army pilot who gets recruited by the mysterious interviewer to eventually pilot the robot. She’s abrasive and rude and not a very likeable character, but that made me like her even more! Throughout the story, Kara is tested again and again and slowly a more vulnerable side of her is revealed. Her dry humour and unapologetic rage cemented her as one of the best characters in the book, even though it’s very hard to choose.

This book is for you if…

…you enjoy character-driven science-fiction that’s more concerned with humanity, than with aliens or you like a colourful cast of characters with more sarcasm than should be legal, Sleeping Giants is the book for you!