Direct Descent

I picked up Direct Descent at The Strand in New York City (which is a great bookstore and basically worth a trip to NYC in and of itself) in the same trip that I bought Anathem, Quicksilver, and The Lazarus Effect.  I was just basically buying any Neal Stephenson or Frank Herbert books that I came across.  Due to the shortness of this book it got pushed off and pushed off until I finally read it the other day.  I can say with certainty that it was not at all what I expected.

It is two short stories both set in the same future where all of Earth has been excavated to make room for a gigantic library that holds the entirety of human knowledge.  Both stories feature a malicious government attempting to repress the knowledge represented by a planet sized library.  The concept is interesting and makes for an enjoyable pair of stories.

However, this book was clearly designed for more of the young adult crowd.  The only reason that the stories take as many pages as they do is because there is about 1 (full page) picture every 2.1 pages.  The text is also larger than it needs to be and the stories are a little simplistic, involving concepts like love at first sight and some hand-wavey explanations of things.

The concept is interesting but the execution is lacking.  I think perhaps if I had read this 14 or 15 years ago, I might have enjoyed it more but as it stands it just seemed a little too childish.

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.