This book was described as a romance story on the back of the copy I bought. I'll be charitable, and presume that this was an attempt by the publishing company to sell more copies to romance-craving readers, rather than the author's honest opinion of the plot. Because if the author's idea of romance is what is described in "When We Were Real", then I feel genuinely sorry for him.
The main character, "Murph", escapes a female-dominated society where men are opressed much like women were on our world before the onset of feminism. He joins a corporate army, where he meets Violet, a fox-human hybrid. The two become friends and have sex a few times, and are then separated by an accident. And that, for almost the entire length of the novel, is all we hear about Violet.
The main part of the story sees Murph travelling the universe, meeting women, having sex with them and moving on. At one point, when meeting a new woman who seems to take an interrest in him, Murph thinks "oh no, not again". I couldn't agree more. While I find nothing wrong with graphic descriptions of sex, too much of it becomes reptitive, boring, and pointless.
When we finally meet Violet again, the reader really doesn't care. For one thing they have probably forgotten about her, and for another there was no indication that Murph felt anything more for her than any of the countless other women he had been with.
In addition to all this, although the story is told in first person perspective, we never seem to get inside Murph's head, which is pretty impressive. Not even when he is violently gang-raped or forced to kill innocent civillians do you get more than an inkling of an idea of what his personality is like.
A lot of the ideas presented are interresting, if only they had been developed further... But they never are. The book is thick, but even so I got the feeling that the author was trying to present too many ideas at once. Yes war is bad, sexism is bad and racism is bad... But there are other books that tell us this in a much better way.
Avoid. Not even worth it for the graphic sex scenes.
