G. Deyke reviewed Will Save The Galaxy For Food by Yahtzee Croshaw (Jacques McKeown, #1)
[Adapted from initial review on Goodreads.]
3 stars
This is my third Yahtzee Croshaw book, and I'm starting to get the hang of them. Characters who are thrown together through circumstance but remain at odds with one another throughout the book seem to be a staple.
Will Save the Galaxy for Food none-too-subtly satirises the Golden Age of science fiction, which means: as someone who's read a bit of Golden Age sci-fi but isn't extremely familiar with it, I can give it only a limited review. I can say, though, that familiarity with Golden Age sci-fi isn't a prerequisite for enjoying the book.
It is humorously written: a pleasant read, though not an especially deep one. The characters are all pretty much stereotypes, but that's kind of the point. One could make an argument about performative wokeness - I recall a moment when both sexism and "middle-aged white women caught saying something politically incorrect" were mocked in one …
This is my third Yahtzee Croshaw book, and I'm starting to get the hang of them. Characters who are thrown together through circumstance but remain at odds with one another throughout the book seem to be a staple.
Will Save the Galaxy for Food none-too-subtly satirises the Golden Age of science fiction, which means: as someone who's read a bit of Golden Age sci-fi but isn't extremely familiar with it, I can give it only a limited review. I can say, though, that familiarity with Golden Age sci-fi isn't a prerequisite for enjoying the book.
It is humorously written: a pleasant read, though not an especially deep one. The characters are all pretty much stereotypes, but that's kind of the point. One could make an argument about performative wokeness - I recall a moment when both sexism and "middle-aged white women caught saying something politically incorrect" were mocked in one fell swoop, which is nice on its own but somewhat undercut by the absolute whiteness of the entire cast - but given that a) it's a satire of a very white (sub-)genre and b) every character is kind of a stereotype, that's somewhere between "expected" and "maybe not a bad thing".
Selling points: funny; ...IN SPACE; a male lead and a female lead who never threaten to kiss; worldbuilding elements carried through to their logical conclusions; the thing where someone is constantly leaping from one probably-deadly situation to another and just kind of rolls with it; occasional moral depravity.
Warnings: not the book to go to for deep hard-hitting emotional stuff; indeed, not the book to go for for anything serious; not great on the diversity front either; a whole lot of language that, while it'd pass any censorship filter, is within the context of the book extremely foul; a good degree of senseless violence (wait, hang on, is that a selling point?).
