Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

by Eddie Robson

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is a quirky SF post-first-contact mystery by Eddie Robson. Due out 28th June 2022 from Macmillan on their Tor/Forge imprint, it's 288 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

I was fascinated by the premise of the book and by the world building (mostly, more on that later). It's post-first-alien-contact in the near future. The aliens, Logi, can only communicate through telepathic images to perceptive individuals, with the proviso that doing so renders the human translator drunk in the process.

I had some trouble engaging with the story because it's told in third person point of view in the present tense. It was obviously an intentional choice, for the direct told-in-the-moment kinetic style, but I just found it intrusive and ever so slightly annoying to read. The writing itself is quite competent. The central concepts, the plotting, and the world building are a bit chaotic and scattered, again undoubtedly intentionally, but the fact that the disparate plot threads never really resolved into a central and complete denouement felt unbalanced to me, especially with regard to the setting (near-future NYC which felt a tiny bit lazy), and that there didn't seem to be many real or profound observations about the Logi (or indeed humans). The primary characters are very well rendered and I found them compelling. There are numerous secondary characters however which felt two dimensional and incomplete.

Overall, it's an interestingly offbeat book and well written. Three and a half stars for me, likely higher for fans of avant-garde SF murder mysteries.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.