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Antolius

Antolius@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 1 month ago

I mostly read sci-fi and fantasy in all shapes and sizes; paper, e-books and audiobooks.

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Antolius's books

Currently Reading

2025 Reading Goal

24% complete! Antolius has read 6 of 25 books.

William Gibson: Spook Country (2007) 3 stars

Spook Country is a 2007 novel by speculative fiction author William Gibson. A political thriller …

Mediocre

3 stars

It was a bit weird for me to read Gibson outside of Sci-Fi genre. For example, while his brand heavy descriptions give credence & lived-in texture to a more fantastical cyberpunk setting, here they can be a bit cumbersome. Even in Pattern Recognition they were thematically appropriate, but here they felt kinda out of place.

In light of recent 2020s tech trends It was also funny to see a purportedly "non-fictional" 2000s world in which high fidelity AR goggles are commonplace, but everyone looses their minds about GPS.

Otherwise, the novel is perfectly serviceable. Pace is good, character motivations mostly check out. There's some "eccentric billionaire with goldfish-like attention span" reasoning, but that too seems plausible. In the end mystery is revealed, plot points solved, good guys win & bad guys lose.

In the end it left me craving for a more traditional Sci-Fi read.

reviewed The Outside by Ada Hoffmann (The Outside)

Ada Hoffmann: The Outside (2019, Angry Robot) 4 stars

Autistic scientist Yasira Shien has developed a radical new energy drive that could change the …

Not bad, short of good

3 stars

Content warning Discussing some plot and world building details

Kate Mascarenhas: The Psychology of Time Travel (2019, Crooked Lane Books) 4 stars

In 1967, four female scientists worked together to build the world’s first time machine. But …

Master class on time travel

5 stars

I really appreciate how time travel is envisioned and portrayed in this book. It has no logic holes and it avoids paradoxes, e.g. the future is predetermined here. It doesn't make up too much technical details to explain how it works, because techno babble is not what this story is about.

It is, as the name suggest, about impact of time travel on human psychology, but also sociology. It envisions a culture emerging inside the organization of time travelers. It explores what taboos it develops, what language, how it operates considering the foresight available to it, etc.

On a backdrop of this thoughtful world building Mascarenhas explores inter-personal relationships of her characters. There's a revenge subplot, a romance subplot, a power struggle subplot. They all intertwine wonderfully between time periods and characters; often the same character coming from different time periods. It does take a little bit of concentration to …