Book Review: Sleeping Giants, by Sylvain Neuvel

I'll start off by saying that this is a most unusual book.  Note that this is not a comment that is negative, derogatory, or intended to dissuade people from reading this book in any way.  I'm saying that this book is different.  Let me explain.

This book is not written like a typical novel, with prose and dialogue.  Sleeping Giants reads like a dossier or case file, like you may have seen in various TV shows or movies that involve the FBI, CIA, or some kind of government project - in particular, ones which are told from an "interview" standpoint.  One that immediately jumps to mind is The Usual Suspects, with Kevin Spacey - he is being interviewed, and everything other scene in the movie is a flashback of what his character is describing.  Aside from the prologue, every other chapter is presented as a "file number" which is one of the following:

• a journal entry by one of the characters
• an interview conducted by a mysterious, unnamed character who appears to be running things from the shadows
• a recorded conversation from a telephone call or a mission which is being monitored remotely.

An interesting aspect of this is that, while the files are consecutive, we are apparently only getting a glimpse - there are many gaps in the numbering, representing missing or omitted files.  For me, an interesting question is:  what is contained in those files, and does it matter to the story?  That is, will we find out about some of these files in the sequel?  Then again, this might just be how the author decided to arrange things, assuming that the missing files contain tedious and mundane elements of the story that don't offer much into the big picture.

The story begins simply enough, and the pace is a little slow at the beginning, but gradually the pace picks up and the story becomes much more interesting.  During the course of the story, I was surprised by several events, and there were a few things that I guessed would be coming.  Although this book is relatively short, at just over 300 pages, it deals with some pretty complex issues.  Without revealing much of the story (all of this is available on the jacket of the book):

• a giant metal hand which is thousands of years old is found buried under the ground - we are not alone in the universe, and it is obvious that the architects of the hand were significantly more advanced than humanity a LONG time ago.
• world politics and cold war attitudes play a part.
• the ethics of taking human lives and/or promoting suffering to further scientific progress - this is something that is repeated several times.
• with access to such powerful technology, would humanity ultimately destroy itself.

The last item reminded me of Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, who made three disturbing statements about the technology being used to create the dinosaurs:

• it didn't require any discipline to obtain it
• you didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it
• your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

If you've seen the movie or read the Michael Crichton book on which it is based, you now how well such uninformed meddling plays out.  All of these statements apply to the technology in Sleeping Giants; if you don't understand what you are dealing with, you shouldn't be messing around with it.  While many of these themes have been explored in other works of fiction in the past, I feel that they are explored somewhat differently here.  After all, there is no typical action as you would find in a normal story, due to the story format - you learn of just about everything second hand, after it has happened.

There are also plenty of twists in this story, some of which I saw coming, but most of which I didn't.  I found the characters to be very real, and I appreciated that several of them had to deal with very real problems.  There are no super-humans here.

By the end of the book, the potential direction of the story becomes much more complex, there are many unanswered questions, and there is a "holy crap" cliffhanger ending.  It is going to be a tough wait for book 2 to be released in April of 2017 - at least its not on a George R. R. Martin release schedule.

Over the years, I have only read one other book that executes this story format to this degree.  That book was Exegesis, by Astro Teller.  That story is constructed as a series of email exchanges between an artificial intelligence researcher and their program which becomes self-aware.  Back when I read this book, the email format really drew me in - and, when this book was first published, email would probably have been the only way a program would be able to communicate with a person once it was on the network.  While I initially found this format took a little getting used to, I ultimately felt that it worked very well for Sleeping Giants.

Sleeping Giants is a very successful debut by a very promising new author, and the fact that this "dossier" format was attempted was pretty daring.  The fact that it was inspired by UFO Robot Grendizer, known as Grandizer in the US (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Five), made it all the more intriguing.  Here's the interesting article where I first read about this (shared with me by the author):  http://io9.gizmodo.com/sylvain-neuvel-tells-us-how-anime-grendizer-jumpstarted-1774962665.

I'm really looking forward to the continuation of the story in Waking Gods next year, but I am left wondering if this will be an ongoing series, or if it is possible for things to be wrapped up in a single sequel.