Review: The Idiot Gods

The Idiot Gods by David Zindell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, this started out as an interesting take on the world seen through an orca's eyes. Which I quite enjoyed, even if it was a touch hero-worshippy, and painted orcas as not just intelligent, but wise philosopher-kings. And humans catch the orca and make it jump through hoops because they suck, and I'm all on board with hating those jerks. But then it got _really_ preachy, and started depicting the orcas as hyper-intelligent ultra-moralistic superbeings who could travel through time and space with the power of their minds and yet couldn't comprehend the most basic of human language concepts (but could, when it was convenient to condemn them some more and be superior, and then couldn't again, when it was convenient to condemn them instead for being incomprehensibly stupid.) Basically, the only thing that you could count on remaining consistent from one paragraph to the next is that all humans are bad. And somewhere in there I lost the passion to keep reading. I still wanted to finish it, just to see how the story ended, but I found myself easily distracted, until finally the library book was due and I hadn't finished it.

I still think this is an intriguing book, if by no means Zindell's best. Full of interesting thought-provoking ideas, even if they often didn't quite make sense in the story they were set in. (For instance, it is stated as fact - and somewhat exaggeratedly belabored - that orcas basically don't have and cannot comprehend the concept of abstract nouns. They always send a perfect picture of whichever orca (e.g.) that they're discussing in conversation. Which is a really interesting idea, and would make for an interesting story, if it weren't immediately contradicted by the very next sentence of the orca speculating about the nature of "orcas" and "humans" - two abstract nouns.)

I would happily have finished the book, given enough time. But I'm not that crushed that I didn't.

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