Iris [Paperback]

One hundred and twenty-four pages was all I could stomach. I'd feel better if I hadn't paid an inflated price in the airport. Sophomoric at best, this exercise in peurile rambling is not worth the paper on which it is printed.

Staggeringly, unmitigably awful.
Traditional science fiction used to present the notion that humanity would carefully select only its very best for that initial encounter with an alien civilization. Recent stories have left the selection up to chance, (Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" sequels actually postulated a sampling of people dominated by criminals.) but "Iris" leaves first contact up to the most pathetic assortment of head cases, psychos, deviants, perverts, sadists, masochists, schizophrenics, co-dependents, and just plain neurotics that Earth (and the Moon!) could rustle up!
This shipload of losers rockets off into space, seeking to...
find themselves...
or find out who they are...
or gather their feelings...
or learn how to relate...
or heal...
or grieve...
or get in touch with their inner beingness and personism...
or some such nonsense!
No kidding. Every plot twist comes in a blizzard of "issues," and is followed by a period when the characters decide "to move on!"
Here they are, orbiting a hostile rogue planet on the outskirts of the solar system, and en masse they plunge into a computerized virtual reality world to escape from, well, real reality!
The very first few disgusting lines of the very first page of the first chapter are a valuable flag for the unmitigable avalanche of literary sewage to come.
One woman actually freezes to death because her shipmates are too busy with life and death survival concerns to rescue her, as she expects them to, from her own narcissistic stunt out on the subzero surface of an airless asteroid.
Whew! Fortunately, the only aliens they all find are a long dormant shipload of resentful biomechanoids, rebellious robots and ambiguously unfriendly computer programs.
With ambassadors like this to the cosmos, the human race would be lucky not to get blown to oblivion just so the universe could be rid of our whining!
Be sure to miss this one!

I tried, I really did. I'd read and loved all of Barton's 90's solo work, had found White Light subpar but still worthwhile, but I just couldn't finish this--I did manage to slog through nearly two-hundred pages in ten days, but I usualy read a few books over that kind of stretch. I can handle slower-paced novels, denser pieces, but this is simply too heavy-handed stylistically, with too little reward for the reader. After 100 pages, nothing has actually happened--oh yeah, the characters thought about sex alot--no plot advancement had occured, nothing meaningful had been exposed... It just went on and on with little point. And there were what felt like a dozen interchangeable characters. At 200, things were much the same, and I still couldn't tell any of the characters apart.

Too big, too complex, too slowly paced, poorly characterised... As an aspiring writer, I hate to slag a work like this, but please, stay away. Barton is a highly talented and important author, and he is largely ignored (this book, his first of note, may have something to do with that). Grab one of his solo efforts; Acts of Conscience and When We Were Real are still in print, and are two of his best.