Books with no heart

As part of my preparation for the three panels I'm speaking on at Dublin Worldcon next month I've been re-reading some books I want to reference in my comments.  One of them is a novel I couldn't really get to grips with when I read it the first time round a few years ago.  All the viewpoints are first person, but they're different viewpoints of different bodies of the same entity, which is extremely confusing.

There are two narrative threads running though the book, and when I first read it I couldn't figure out what was going on.  In this re-read I've grasped that, but I still struggled with the slow pace at the start of the book.  A slow pace which was caused by a massive info-dump of colonial history backstory.

So already I'm on my way to disengaging from the book, and the narrative isn't helping that.  I can't get on with books which don't exhibit some basic sense of morals, and one of the biggest moral stances I want to see is a respect for life.  The problem is, the book I'm re-reading doesn't have that.

A lot of SF uses alien species to present moral systems other than our own, but the problem with this book is that the protagonists are supposed to be human,  albeit heavily modified, and some of them are immortal.  And that's a big problem for me, because those human characters just shoot anyone who opposes the annexation of their planet, or opposes the ruler.

The way the book is written portrays that immortal character, and her loyal soldiers, as totally heartless.  There is a sense of hopelessness on the part of the annexed people, who cannot hope to challenge the rule of an all-powerful tyrant with access to devastating weaponry that could destroy their whole planet.

I need a spark of rightness in a book, even if the person with heart and fire has not a hope in hell of changing the system.  I need to feel that they might have an outside chance, if they're lucky.  Books like the one I'm reading might be making important points about the brutality of colonialism, but I can't fall in love with such a narrative.  And I've found from experience that if I can't identify with the moral stance of the main characters then I can't love that book.   And if I don't love it, I don't remember it.

The books I do fall in love with, the ones I remember the stories of, are stories with strongly-defined morals which I can identify with.  It's often said that readers like to imagine themselves as the characters in a book, but I really don't want to imagine myself as a heartless person devoid of all morals.