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Enjoyable read though it felt at times like a Heinlein novel, which I did once like but now mostly give me the creeps.

Interesting start to a world but the writing was quite uneven and I did feel as well plotted as it could have been. I liked some of the stylized language and manners but sometimes it seemed like the author forgot to use them for a sentence or a scene. I felt that N K Jemisin was more successful in pulling off the unconventional language in both the Broken Earth and Hundred Thousand Kingdoms books.

Quite an impressive novel though not timeless. Despite all of our problems today the world has made progress. Maybe this serves as a reminder to be ever vigilant against backsliding, but also how little has changed. I can't find any fault in this book but the characters don't speak to me. I don't see myself in any of the protagonists or antagonists. Perhaps a view from one of the other men on the scab train could have shown someone lost in it all and struggling to make sense and choose sides.

Probably the last KSR novel which does make me sad. It was very much of the form for one of their novels. There were some threads that could have been developed more and I thought this would get a LOT darker before hope reemerged. I kind of think that it should have gotten darker. At times I felt like this was the most Neal Stephenson of KSR novels.

I had asked for a recommendation of a novel about labour so this wasn't really what I expected. I had wanted to read a Dashiell Hammett novel and this is a probably the only hard boiled crime novel I will read. It was true to form and as hard bitten as I expected. I was surprised at some of criminal behaviour of the "good guy" protagonist, I hadn't understood that element of the genre.

I didn't enjoy this novel as much as the prior Bas-Lag novels. There was something incoherent and incomplete about it and the result was that it didn't fit together for me. There was a lot to like.

This could have been, should have been, a much shorter book. I do like books with a languorous pace but this one was just too repetitive and it was too repetitive. Nothing would have suffered if a third had been excised.