I generally am a big fan of historical fiction, and The Technologists certainly had a cool concept. Being an engineer (and someone who unsuccessfully tried to enroll in MIT) I liked the setting with the start of the Institute of Technology and their rivalry with Harvard, who are painted as arrogant, egotistical, and regressive in this novel. Having said that, there were some things I liked about this novel and somethings I didn’t like.

The Good: I thought the characterization in this novel was strong. I liked the MIT students and the Technologists. These characters were well done. They were an interesting and diverse bunch who were easy to root for. I also enjoyed how they went about trying to investigate the wild technologically based attacks happening in Boston just after the Civil War. There was good tension in this novel.

The Bad: These wild elaborate technology based attacks were not well explained, making the believability factor low. It’s not that I didn’t think they could happen, but the author didn’t sell it well enough with science and technology to back it up. The other thing was that the ultimate villain in this novel wasn’t believable either. He didn’t have the knowledge, education, or tools to pull off the things he accomplished in this novel. I didn’t buy this person as the evil mastermind, and his motivation to achieve utter destruction was weak. It was also a bit long-winded.

In the end, I thought this was a solid novel and worth reading.

Carl Alves – author of The Invocation ( )

This book has a way of drawing you in with it's characters and rich details. Set in Boston a few years after the Civil War we follow one of the soon to graduate students from a new college that is forming MIT in their last few months of college.

There is a rivalry there that Pearl makes come to life between MIT and Harvard, but his storytelling is what keeps you reading late into the night. Especially when he develops the characters so easily.

The ending will keep you guessing, but even that takes a turn that you don't see coming. Even to the last page he holds on to the reader with all of the different twists.

Well written, well thought out, and probably one of the best fictions books I've read in a while. ( )

I had high expectations going into this one, given its academic and historical settings and its respectable treatment of geeks, but it didn't work out. The likable protagonist and most of the supporting cast were fine and interesting enough, and the overarching theme was good, centered as it was on a fear of technology and the jobs that it might take from people--a theme that's not unheard of even in today's world. But what killed this one for me was the pacing. To say that it was glacial would be to insult glaciers. It simply dragged on for far too long, coupled with far too many slow patches tossed in during what should have been the more intense, up-tempo scenes. At first I thought that it might have been due to real life forcing me to read this one in bits and pieces instead of going through it chunks at a time, but I just kept getting the same impression over and over again with regard to the pacing, coupled with the realization that I never reached for this book with excitement at the thought of picking up where I left off. Rather, there were reading sessions that seemed more like chores, which is just not a good thing. Ever. ( )

This was a fun little read with a little bit of a steampunk vibe. It chronicles the first class to enroll at the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their adventures in overcoming the general public's suspicion of technology by solving some mysterious pranks-turned-violent-incidents in the city of Boston. This book felt like a lighter, more mechanically inclined variation of [b:The Alienist|40024|The Alienist (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, #1)|Caleb Carr|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169386132s/40024.jpg|2266643]. But the twists in the culprit's identity were good; I was convinced at least twice that I knew who it was, yet was still surprised in the end. ( )

I've been intrigued by Matthew Pearl for a while - I actually own both 'The Dante Club' and 'The Poe Shadow' and have been planning on reading them - but I got an ARC of his latest, so it went to the top of the list. Well, eh, I might have been a little overexcited.
This wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't really what I expected. I'd read things comparing it to 'The Alienist' so I was expecting a serious, realistic thriller set in the 19th century. It wasn't. Although the author did his research on the early days of MIT (this book's setting), I didn't find his depiction of the school convincing. (The afterword, where he talks about the facts behind the story, was actually the most interesting part, for me.) I found the characters rather cartoonish. The alternate history/steampunk aspects of the story were very far-fetched, again, reminding me almost of a comic book in prose form. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I didn't find myself getting really into it. Although it was a mystery, I didn't find myself compulsively turning pages, either. I'm still planning on reading the other books by this author, though, especially as they all seem to have interesting topics. ( )