The sequel to Sleeping Giants , Waking Gods (2017) continues Sylvain Neuvel‘s story of human encounters with radically advanced technology.
It follows the same structure: interviews and journal entries and transcribed conversations; and, again surprisingly to me, somehow it still manages to be a page turner.
I think this is partially because of the absolutely inscrutable nature of the aliens: they don’t communicate, they just appear, and without any warning, they wreck massive destruction upon humanity, wiping out hundreds of thousands of people without explanation or clear cause.
That is the strength of the book, the sense of how humanity might respond to a truly lost cause, facing impossible odds without even the possibility of surrender. That context helps bring the humanity of the characters to the forefront.
There is, of course, a way out, but the procedural nature of the solution to save humanity is, for me, the weakest part of the book: the crisis is more compelling than the cure.
There is a third book, and at some point (once it’s released in paperback) we’ll see how it all ends up. Until then, if the description of Sleeping Giants seemed attractive, so will Waking Gods.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Trying to make this a different answer than with Sleeping Giants, I would move to Neuvel’s willingness to create an inscrutable adversary. It takes a lot of trust to believe your readers will buy into an antagonist whose motivations remain quite opaque.