Playing God [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Oxmoor House
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446930393
• ISBN-13: 978-0446930390
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What Happens to a Writer When You Succeed, July 8, 1999

By 

Dianna Deeley (San Francisco,, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing God (Hardcover)

This novel had at least five places it could have stopped. What's more, this novel wanders all over the place. Ok, Zettle went from unknown to famous. The publisher said, "You can have a hardbound if you give us so many pages." Then, god help us, we were saddled with this.

Someone commented on the really pointless descriptions of clothing and so on. It's worse than that. The first person to actually believe anyone would be stupid enough to allow the takeover of one of the space stations gets a medal. The supposed moral dilemmas annoyed me by their shallowness. The "plague" annoyed me worse. We are shown a human society that is extremely advanced, technologically, and it can't solve the plague in five minutes? Zettel's hand-waving on that one irritated me beyond measure. The text was also sloppily proofed -- I actually extracted my red pencil and started ticking and fixing the errors. I can't believe a published author would allow the multiple cases of the wrong "its" to get through, or that a publisher would send it to press in that state, but they did.

The biggest problem is, I actually liked both Reclamation and Fool's War. This novel should have been half the length it was, and better thought out.

Yeah, I'm ticked. I paid hardback price for this, and I should have waited. I will never buy another book by Zettel in hardback.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice background but not much plot, November 11, 1999

By 

Wayne (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing God (Mass Market Paperback)

The ideas in this book are interesting (but the whole gender-changing thing was done much better in Left Hand of Darkness), but that is all this book really has. I had to force myself to read the first 60%, knowing it would pick up and start to get interesting (her other books are like this too), and it did eventually switch into higher gear, but the twists and turns after that didn't make much sense, and the big dramatic idea that the main character has for ending the conflict left me asking, "what was that again? "

On the postitive side, the character development of the aliens was really nice. I felt myself feeling a mixture of sympathy and frustration at the way they acted and could imagine being in the human's position and being torn between on one hand wanting to "play god" and impose my ideas of how these stupid barbarians should behave, and on the other just let them kill each other if they couldn't find a better way to survive.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting plot but not as good as Fool's War, May 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Playing God (Hardcover)

This book was a good read, but I was disconcerted by the fact that Zettel would occasionally stop the action to describe what everyone was wearing in flowery and very descriptive terms. (She didn't say "She was wearing a blue tunic," but "a deep blue tunic with detailed trimming, blah blah blah."

The characters' clothing didn't seem central to the plot (as in, for example, Memoirs of a Geisha). So frankly, I don't give a darn what they are wearing, I'd like to get back to the plot please.

I preferred Zettel's second book, Fool's War, although this one still moved along quite nicely (aside from the clothing descriptions).