Reviews and Comments

Like Children of Time, Children of Ruin is one of the best, most solidly science fiction books out there. The first half of Children of Ruin was just as good as Children of Time, however, as it got into the second half I found it less convincing, and not quite as compelling. Still a great read.

People and relationships are complicated.

The first half or so is like a better written version of 1984. Then it gets interesting...

A seemingly simple story that touches on so many issues that we are facing in these times. Makes you wonder how we psychologically manage to live on this earth.

Will change the way you see the world, and can't help but make you appreciate just how magnificent all the species who share the world with us are.

What a fabulous book. Everyone should read it.

Will change the way you see the world, and can't help but make you appreciate just how magnificent all the species who share the world with us are.

Interesting and engaging book. His examples and "fragments" of an anarchist way of thinking will resonate with most people I think, but they all seem pretty marginal, and they can, and do take place within existing governments.

As an inspiration to question state and corporate overreach, and the tendency of states to simplify and codify messy and complex community interaction, this book makes a good contribution. The author doesn't suggest he's trying to do more than that, but if you are looking for justification of the basic anarchist premise that states should be abolished, you'll find no reason in these pages.

Despite the fact that I'd like their premise to be true, and that it seems there is truth to the idea that "primitive" societies in the past were more complex and interactive than we once thought, the authors have cherry picked data and built a variety of straw men to dismantle in order to recklessly extrapolate and generalize to make an argument about what they would like society to be like.

Read this book with a lot of caution, and do some other reading of both the specific examples they discuss, and also of the general context and premises that they put forward. They present a lot of information and it is easy to take them at their word if you have no knowledge of these or related fields.

An interesting story with compelling characters, I'm left with what I feel is a good sense of what life was like for the folks at Turtle Mountain Reservation at that time. Though the book was compelling, I think it would have benefited by sticking to the main story a bit more and being a bit shorter.

Engaging read, I enjoyed it quite a lot. It is a fairly basic, and despite all the twists and turns, in the main, a predictable plot. The main character, and others, have a really crappy and sad existence, but because of the style of the book, it doesn't really bring out any depth of feeling in the reader. It reminded me of an anecdote, whether true or not, about the making of the first Star Wars movie in 1977. Apparently, after the heroes were trapped in the trash compactor, Mark Hamill asked why, in the next scene, their hair wasn't wet. Harrison Ford apparently replied, "It ain't that kind of movie kid." Well The Hunger Games "ain't that kind of book", but it's well worth a read.

I enjoyed reading this book, and it was interesting. I thought the author did a good job of not making the society be dystopian or clearly bad or evil, but rather just a different decision about what makes a happy society. I felt the ending was weak in many ways however.

Somehow one of the most upsetting books I've read.