Review: Fault Tolerance (Chilling Effect, #3)
EricMesa
- 2 minutes read - 385 wordsFault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Valerie Valdes continues the Gen X/Millenial pastiche that the Chilling Effect in this third, and final, entry.
A few of the references across the trilogy:
- Voltron
- Portal (from previous books)
- Smash Bros (crash sisters)
- Death Star-like weapon
- Solid snake reference?
- Transformers
- Pokemon (in previous books)
-Captain Planet
Sometimes the references are just in the chapter titles and other times they are important plot points. The insane thing is that this WORKS for three whole books! You may or may not shake your head, but this doesn’t feel like Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. This feels like a real, cohesive universe. It’s not jokey (although it’s not overly dramatic). I don’t know how Valdes pulled this off.
When it comes to this book, specifically, it’s a nice cap to the series. It concludes nearly all the plot threads (even the cats) the trilogy introduced. Eva is able to use her more fully actualized self (all that self-improvement she did over the first two books) and we get a real bad-ass with a really awesome found family supporting her. I figured out what the final twist was going to be because I got all the references (I’m in the target age group), but along the way, I was constantly surprised at all the little ways that Valdes had to create satisfying mini story arcs.
I didn’t know where else to put this: earlier in the trilogy we learn of the Toadic (not sure how it’s spelled since I listened to the audiobook). It’s not explicitly said (I’m pretty sure), but it’s easy to tell that they look like dinosaurs. This book had an explanation for that and I loved it so much.
Should you read this book? If you read the first two, I don’t see why not - it’s mostly more of the same. Over the past decade or two a lot has been written about how culture is always a mashup of what came before, but that the Gen X and Millenial creatives accelerated that and create a remix culture that includes much more than just music. Valdes’ trilogy is a great example of how this can be successfully done in the science fiction realm.