Reviews and Comments

I love David Graeber, and this was an interesting book, unlike most things I've read of his. It's a shame he couldn't read the audiobook himself, because the narrator manages to make this sound dull.

Loved it just as much as the previous two books that it builds on.

Notes:

New planets, new forms of alien intelligence.
The corvids were my favorite alien species in a while.
Are they a form of AI? Can AI be sentient? Are any of us? Questions that loom especially large this year.
Second book looking at the simulation hypothesis that I've read this year.
Liff's story is heartbreaking.
Decanting the swarm intelligence from book 2 into a single person named Miranda is a brilliant solution to the problem of how to address the "we".
The eventual reveal again comes with a twist and a second, even better reveal. How does Tchaikovsky do this?

The extraterrestrials make this feel less like a normal Tackleford story. Onion Lem is a right good laugh once you get to know him.

In early victorian England, foreign translators at Oxford try to take on the empire, which works on a translation-based kind of magic that involves silver bars. Many times, we think it's all over for our protagonists, and they receive a miraculous rescue, it's quite gutting. Until at the end, they don't.

I liked it, the magic is very clever, the parallels to our real world are there, although events have been altered. There's still an opium war, an abolitionist movement, English exceptionalism and disdain for others, all the loathsome things that make up British Empire.

Manages to make "We're going on an adventure" the most terrifying thing to hear.
Take the spiders from the previous book, add octopuses, a planet full of strange aliens, and a dangerous swarm intelligence.