Review: The Arc by Ben Oliver

Finishing the trilogy which started in The Loop and continued in The Block, The Arc concludes the story of Luka Kane.

Luka, alongside the small group of allies he has gathered, must defeat the AI named Happy which has control of much of the world. The series has often been compared to The Matrix and the central concept, that Happy intends using humans as fuel, is identical.

The book is propulsive in its writing, never slowing down in a race to the finish. This comes at the expense of characterisation, with most of the cast barely getting more than a few lines of dialogue. When they do get some more page time, it is often for the purposes of exposition.

The Arc suffers from being forced to tie up a lot of plot in not a lot of space and could have benefitted from being longer, to give the story, and especially the characters, more room to breathe.

Ben Oliver has a knack for writing interesting action scenes and creates interesting situations for his cast to be in, but some further development of his cast is sorely missed.

 

Paddy Lennon