Although it is only 176 (kindle) pages long, Proof of Concept feels like a novel length read. Not in the ‘it’s just slow and boring and feels like it’s taking forever way’ that one might assume, either. Instead, Gwyneth Jones does a great job of giving the reader so much story in a relatively short amount of pages. As soon as she establishes the setting, she’s off and running. The pace is fast, the dialogue is good, and there’s enough death to make a sci-fi & horror hound happy.Gwyneth Jones exp...

Tried to pack too much conceptually into a short amount of pages. It has the bones of intriguing dystopian future world building, and could even map out better visually via anthology like PKD's Electric Dreams / Black Mirror, but as a novella didn't work as well. It would be interesting to revisit as a full length novel that takes more time to effectively introduce the lingo and tech used.

For such a short novella, Proof of Concept is packed to bursting with plot threads, thematic questions, and worldbuilding elements. The story takes place in a fascinating dystopian world where pollution and global warming have pushed the world's population into giant "hives" separated by toxic "Dead Zones" where impoverished non-citizens try to eke out their short existences. MegaCorps have a chokehold on culture and politic, and even scientific endeavor must be turned into pop-culture and seek

I’ve had this obscure novella by Gwyneth Jones on my to-read list for a few years and recently located a copy on eBay. I’m not generally a completist, but have read a good many of Jones’ novels. Her Bold as Love series is one of my favourite visions of the future: a guardedly utopian Britain in which technological civilisation has largely collapsed and government is by attractive rockstars. I highly recommend it. Her other sci-fi tends to be intellectually interesting but isn't as emotionally co...

➸ Trigger warnings for (view spoiler)[child pregnancy as the result of incestuous rape (father-daughter) mentioned, emesis, human medical experimentation, alcohol consumption mentioned, recreational drug use mentioned, dead body, death of a partner by stabbing (off-page), murder & mass murder (hide spoiler)].▷ Representation: Nigerian, queer & nonbinary scs. Blog • Trigger Warning Database • Twitter • Instagram

2.5 stars, really. I was disappointed in this, because Gwyneth Jones's Bold As Love series is absolutely magnificent, among my very favorites, and the two other of her novels that I've read were not quite as much my thing but still interesting and worthwhile, but Proof of Concept was considerably weaker in my opinion. Part of that was the novella length. The ending was too abrupt (and also not to my taste). While the protagonist, Kir, was fairly well developed into a complicated person, all of t...

2.5 stars One of those books I really want to like more than I actually did. I love the concept, the characters have great potential, and I like some of Jones' wordsmithing.But...the concept was not as well explored as it could have been; the characters did not come alive and remained quite two dimensional; and the clever wordsmithing did not make up for the sort of confusing muddle of a story.So I didn't hate it, but I could have given it a pass and not missed anything.

2.5 stars - This was a disappointment, honestly. Rushed, didn't establish the world or characters very well, and the ending came out of left field. I think this would have worked better as a novel, as there would have been more time to establish the world and set things up so that events felt truly shocking and meaningful. As it is, I was just kinda confused and stopped caring by the halfway point.

This review is going to have to be spoilerific so I can talk about this book.SPOILERS AHEAD.This has an interesting idea that is poorly realized.The global ecosystem has pretty much collapsed, so some scientists convince the ultra-wealthy One Percent to build an underground lab to test some next-gen physics that will enable humanity to travel faster than light (apparently by teleporting via quantum entanglement).The Needle, as it's called (because something something "needle in a haystack"), is

Life is too short for bad books and I stopped on page 80 of 138 when I realized I was forcing myself to pick it up. I don't think Jones spent enough time developing the world or the characters, the premise had a lot of promise but I had a hard time following the narrative or caring about anything that was happening. This might be a good pick for fans of Jones' writing style, but it didn't work for me.

I found the amount of in-universe jargon used for worldbuilding was just about impenetrable. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer more actual story and less futuristic technobabble.

"On a desperately overcrowded future Earth crippled by climate change, the most unlikely hope is better than none." (Back cover blurb) That hooked me into an intelligent, interesting novella whose heroine is a brilliant survivor with a strange companion. I'm delighted to discover this author and look forward to seeing her other stories.

Gwyneth Jones’s novella Proof of Concept is a densely packed narrative, weaving multiple thematic threads together into a single coherent story. The protagonist, a young woman named Kir, was chosen from a life of brutal poverty to be the host to an AI called Altair - serving as the biological platform for a software too complex to run solely on inanimate hardware. That brutal life was the result of being an outsider, a ‘scav,’ in a world ruined by ecological collapse leading to a severe populati...

short novel that is packed with ideas and ends in a very interesting way begging more books set in the same universe; in a future earth on the verge of definitive catastrophe, the super rich want to flee it for pristine planets and the new physics ("information space") gives them a chance to do so if theoretical ideas about instantaneous translation can be put in practice; and so an experiment is funded in a deep cavern isolated from the rest of the earth; things happen though not quite as expec...

30% in, and I have no idea what's going on. The narrative is all over the place, the dialogue is clunky, and the story just isn't capturing me. This is a short read, but I'm giving up after two chapters. Thanks to Tor for the NetGalley ARC, but this novella just isn't for me.

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date 11th April 2017I’m not sure if it’s my reading comprehension or the book at fault, but I did have some trouble understanding the technology and political background to this. There’s stuff which is obvious (overcrowding has forced people into hive-like cities, people want to go to nearby habitable planets) and then there’s the science and the politics of funding the venture and… whatever all that means.However, on the personal level it worked: Ki...

A rare miss for the tor.com novella line.Earth is a disaster, ravaged by over-population and climate change. Humanity lives in decaying hive arcologies amid the poisoned and dying planet. A project that promises to be the first steps towards getting the masses of humanity off-planet via FTL is started deep under the Earth in an abyssal cavity and some of mankind's best and brightest are recruited, including our view-point character, a young girl with a quantum computer embedded in her brain.Soun...

I'm underwhelmed. I struggled to connect with this novella from the start; maybe I'm just overtired / jetlagged, but it felt chaotic. The twist was telegraphed early, but there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary contortion and obfuscation that reduced the focus on the personal drama and flattened the characters. It's not a bad book, but it just didn't work for me.Full review (less whelmed the more I think about it)

Proof of Concept by Gwyneth Jones is a science fictional novella put out by Tor.com. I picked it up based on a recommendation from a friend, and the vague belief that maybe I'd like Gwyneth Jones more now that I was older.Proof of Concept had some interesting ideas in it but they did not overall make up for certain less interesting aspects of the writing and story. To start off, I found the start difficult to follow. The actual opening scene was OK, as far as these things go, but the subsequent

On a failing, crumbling, future Earth, where climate change has pushed the remaining human civilizations into every smaller and more dangerous areas, the remaining hope for humanity lies in an experimental science installation currently testing new capabilities for navigation towards distant, habitable exoplanets. Kir is one of the scientists confined to The Needle for the duration of the project, but she understands her role at this underground compound has less to do with her skills and everyt...