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The world building, the characters, the whole first act are pitch perfect and beautifully written.

The second half is too much about the overly cute thing where you have to guess who is speaking, and to whom. It gets grating, but if I can make it through Nona The Ninth, I can make it through this.

What really hurt was just the way scifi-magic was used. It didn't have an internal logic, and I couldn't find the emotional truth in it. If you want magic in your book, you need one or more of those things. Stuff just kinda happens and it's not clear who's doing what, if they're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, or when something goes wrong if it was predictable or a surprise.

The world building has so much show, but the space magic is basically all tell. If it only happened a few times it would be easier, but most of the action is cyberpunk magic action. If you don't have any way to reason about what the characters are or aren't capable of, there's little joy in watching them struggle besides the spectacle of the struggle itself. Maybe that's the point? I felt like I was inhabiting the Downworld, but the ego death stuff just didn't land.

A map would have really been appreciated, considering the frequency of place names and how much time is spent traveling.

For my money, it's Evangelion. It even has an echo of the famous kitchen scene! There are a few others like Sovereign attacking the frag (so glad we spent so much time with Sov, shame she never matters to the plot!) and the big cover robot picking up Sunai (who is an incredibly cool character and gets some awesome moments.) Maybe I'm totally off-base here, but the way the pilots are inexorably bound by their trauma to their horrific giant robots felt very Eva. That and the character very much not wanting to get in the robot.

tl;dr cool world, cool characters, strong beginning, tries too hard at the end.

The Things They Carried in space.

I read this book because I wanted to see the origins of Hovertanks as a sci-fi trope, nut what I got was a meditation on war.

It's technology is an analogy for what we had in Vietnam, but it's also a power fantasy... if only we'd had more powerful tanks. More deadly guns. If only the Colonel could have told civilian leaders to stuff it, to grab the knife before it was stabbed in the back and twist it the other way.

But I don't begrudge drake his flights of fancy, or the fact that the Slammers violate the Geneva Convention at least once per vignette. He's telling war stories, through a lense of scifi, sure, but telling them nonetheless. He's not asking for forgiveness here. The foes aren't mindless alien bugs, they're (mostly) humans who had the misfortune of not being the highest bidder. We rarely get insight into which 'side' of these conflicts is right or wrong, and not in the mealy mouthed 40k way.

I would have rated it higher if the narrative was glued together better, and the exposition dumps aren't really necessary. It also includes a short novel 'the tank lords' which I gave up on because I was tired of hearing about gelding.