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So good! It's up there with my favorite Greg Egans! In Clockwork Rocket and Incandescence style, the plot revolves around research in a setting where something fundamental is different. This time we are in a world full of body horror. Your arm can just decide to leave you. The people of this world are used to this, so the book sets off from this baseline and heads for the ever weirder.

The characters are the typical Greg Egan fare: level-headed and reasonable to the extreme. In some stories these come off as bland, but here I really loved them. Being level-headed and reasonable in this world comes off as heroic.

The book is a fun variation on the Bechdel test. I was 20% of the way through when I realized all the characters in this world are women. (In fact all creatures are female.)

I love the way clues are dropped for an important mystery. You are clued in gradually. Someone will figure it out on the first hint, someone will take five hints. No matter where you figure it out, it feels like you solved the puzzle. I suppose it's a common approach, but I found it done well here. All the flashbacks are paced well. Everything works great. There's enough drama left even for the last pages, and I loved how the conclusion wrapped up every thread. Very satisfying.

While the whole book is well made, the unique part is the research fantasy. It's not extremely technical. But it's still fun, and makes you think about how researchers have figured out similar things in our world.

It's a fantastic depiction (as far as a man can tell) of the hardships women face. It's not a new topic, but it's so well done here that it still feels fresh and makes the whole book. We see a lot of woman characters, and each of them is a whole story. They end up very different (and all extremely likable) as they handle their challenges differently.

Or maybe I'm wrong about this? We don't learn anything about the past of the dust-wife or Agnes. We only see Marra's mother and Kania from a distance. I still feel like I know their story. This is the magic of brilliant characterization.

The writing is beautifully crafted. The dialogs are all amazing. Every line feels completely unpredictable and yet spot-on for the character. The pacing is great. Every little bit of detail is used in some way to say something interesting. For example, Marra's faith has little bearing on the story, but we learn this:

"We're a mystery religion," said the abbess, when she'd had a bit more wine than usual, "for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but [Our Lady of Grackles] doesn't seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor."

Or the excellent conversation on chopping wood.

"It's all right," he said. "I've done many things that were terribly important, lives hanging in the balance and so on and so forth. There is something pleasant about chopping wood. If I miss a stroke, nothing awful happens. If a piece of wood is not quite right, it will still burn. If I stack it and it isn't perfect, clans will not fall."

Fenris is a curious character. It's gracious to include a good man in the cast, when the evil of men is a core theme. And he's really a perfect role model. But he's too perfect. He has no struggles, or at least his struggles are not the topic of this book, and he knows it. And his good nature may not be nature at all — it may be a blessing from his godmother. It's impossible not to love him anyway.

All the threads are satisfyingly joined at the end. I guess that's is relatively easy in this world. It's a sort of magical realism. Most of the world is non-magical, but the magic is very unpredictable and strong when it comes. It has no rules at all for the writer. Anything goes. But we still get satisfying consistency when we feel like we're starting to learn the rules. This version of magic felt fresh and entertaining.

My only gripe is with the references to opening the lids of jars. It struck me as a modern problem. Can jars have twisting lids in a fantasy setting? It feels like you would need factories for that.

It's a dangerous and sometimes dark story, but everyone survives! I love happy endings!

Murder by Lamplight has a perfectly Agatha Christie atmosphere. Just hop into a cab on the foggy London streets of the 19th century, and you're set. The murders are perhaps more numerous and gruesome than usual, but the characters are so cheerful it makes up for that. It's light reading.

At first, the strong stroke of feminism in this past setting felt anachronistic. Sure, women didn't have voting rights. But that doesn't mean they were all okay with that! If they had been, they still wouldn't have voting rights today. It's cool to see progressive characters in a classical setting.

My only complaint is that I felt the murderer's identity came out of nowhere. I see in the author's notes that the number of clues we get is the result of careful tuning over many reads. I must be very dumb compared to the beta readers because I saw exactly zero clues. But I suppose it's better than the reverse.

I've only read the first 30%. The main character is unlikable. He only thinks about advancing his career and women. In women his only interest is looks. Accordingly, we get lots of paragraphs about the skin and hair and eyes of his love interests.

This could be fine. Maybe there will be character development! But why not foreshadow that? Indicate somehow that this is a trait of the character and not the author?

I would be fine with an unlikable main character if the book held up otherwise. Is there an exciting plot? Not so far! Only a single thing has happened, and it had seemingly no consequences. The spaceship and its dead pilot were retrieved. Let's get back to advancing this guy's career and leering on women.

How about world building? There is some kind of long-term hook. The last Shaa is about to die. What will happen to their empire? They subjugated all races and forced the Praxis on them. The Praxis is never described, but it looks like aristocracy and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Aliens didn't have to bomb Los Angeles for this! This is the default mode of humanity!

This book relies on aliens to make the world LESS interesting. Fantastic twist.

There's a second character. In a flashback we learn that she probably has a stolen identity. I expect a series of clues about this will be presented every few chapters until a final surprise reveal? There's no hook to make me interested in this. Am I supposed to want to know more because of her fantastic skin and emerald eyes?

I like Cory Doctorow's blog and share his politics. I backed The Lost Cause on Kickstarter. There are some cool things about the book, but overall I wouldn't recommend it.

It's shocking to read "MAGA" in fiction. Most sci-fi authors of today grew up on sci-fi written before 1980, and that is what we think sci-fi is. When those works were originally written, they probably referred to politics of the day. (Every book from that period seems to be a meditation on nuclear war.) But their settings and themes became the settings and themes of sci-fi. No history after 1980 can be included in a sci-fi, because it was never included in the books we grew up with.

It's fantastic that The Lost Cause breaks through this and more authors should do it.

It's clearly very political and that's great too. Sci-fi is supposed to say something.

The main ideological argument of the book is that leftists are hot brown chicks who cook exotic vegan dishes, while the conservatives are fat old white dudes. We can assume they cook bland dry burgers.

Oh, and the conservatives have a beloved sci-fi book that is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that makes them sound like the good guys. So silly to have a book like that, right? Haha!

In the conservatives' book they end up heroically gunning down leftists. While in The Lost Cause the leftists only almost end up heroically gunning down the conservatives. The two sides are not the same!

Both of these phenomena (appeal to hot chicks and claiming to act differently while acting the same) are so blatant. Maybe it's intentional? But to what end?

I have read a total two explicitly political sci-fi stories, The Lost Cause and William Morris's [b:News from Nowhere|189746|News from Nowhere|William Morris|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1172550120l/189746.SY75.jpg|13352231]. It's weird that hot chicks are also a core argument of Morris's.

The book has a few weird quirks. An unsettling amount of alcohol is consumed without any issue. Just non-stop drinking and pot. Is that normal? Am I just old? A significant fraction of the book is dedicated to food too. The dishes sound great and I would love to try them all. But I'm not sure all the detail about them helps the book. I think the argument is "We should let in more immigrants because they bring great food." Which I don't think is a great argument. (Should we reject immigrants that lack a tasty cuisine?) But it can also read as "Look at how many fancy dishes I know!"

Some of the leftist cultural markers are so over the top it's funny. Sex in masks! "Someone gave me a vegan empanada." "I was so ready to tear down my fucking house." As a 40+ Hungarian living in Hungary I can't directly connect with these tribal markers. I accept that tribalism is necessary for building a community. But I would have preferred a book that doesn't simply show that leftists are better and leave it at that. What if the conservatives were hotter? If they had better food? If they were nicer?

An interesting read. It's a pretty unique world, with floating islands, dragonships, devolved dwarves, and arcane constructs by a group of super-wizards who disappeared long ago. On it's own, this book goes absolutely nowhere. A cast of character is built up and basically achieves nothing. The story is clearly intended to unfold over books 2 to 7, but I'm not sure I will tag along.

Perhaps the main issue is that there is nobody to like.

Hugh, an assassin with a golden heart. Or is he? He never kills the child (even though the child is evil) but it may just be because of Bane's magic. He only wants to do good once, when he becomes infatuated with a married woman and kills her husband. What is there to love? I guess he's a good dragonship pilot? Although the only time he flies a dragonship it crashes. Even worse, he dies at the end of a character arc that went nowhere.

Bane, the super evil child. His excuse is that his father is even more evil. But still Bane only ever does selfish and evil things.

Haplo, a member of an evil civilization imprisoned in the Labyrinth. He broke out and is now serving an evil lord and looking for vengeance. His mission is simple: go to this world and throw it into chaos so his lord can conquer it. But he's generally calm and humble. He never shows affection to his dog, but possibly loves it.

Alfred clearly has a heart. He's sorry for all the cruel things he and his buddies did way back. He's also sorry his buddies are dead. And he doesn't want to do cruel things anymore. But he's not sorry enough to admit anything or help anyone.

Limbeck, a caricature revolutionary who keeps cleaning his glasses and writing speeches, while completely out of touch with events around him.


I guess this may be intentional and it all comes together in book 7?

Several of the stories fell flat for me. They all have a gimmick at their core, but they don't all manage to make this gimmick interesting. The collection has two stories though that I love, and it was 100% worth getting it for those two. (Light Up The Clouds and Solidity.)

You And Whose Army? — A problem we can't relate to with a solution we can't relate to. Perhaps it's due to the extreme lack of drama. Greg Egan's writing voice is so extremely rational that it dissolves every conflict. There is no anger or hate when everyone's mental model of others is reasonable and generous. OR! Perhaps this is a metaphor. Is sharing memories through a neural link all that different from sharing them by talking? I'm not sure where that takes it. I liked the ending! While the others did sciences and stuff, Linus practiced the art of handling transplanted memories. Eat dust, bros!

This Is Not The Way Home — A technical story about technical problems driven by a big mystery that is totally not answered at the end. What happened on Earth?! I need to know! This story also shows that the extremely rational writing can kill drama even in single-person stories. My friend killed herself? My fiancé was burned to death? Stranded on the Moon to die? Taking care of a baby in a space suit? Everyone on Earth possibly dead? No tears shed about that, I'm turning a buggy into a spaceship.

Zeitgeber — Again an unrelatable problem with an undramatic solution.

Crisis Actors — This was fun, but weird. A very underrepresented perspective, as our point of view is a climate denialist terrorist. I liked how some of the mental acrobatics was presented. There will be fake blood that proves it's a hoax! There is no fake blood, which proves that they already carried it off. Clear evidence of a hoax! In the end I didn't feel like we got anywhere.

Sleep And The Soul — I love Greg Egan stories where you are in a weird world, but it takes a while to figure out what the twist is. Are we in hell? Are there demons? Is Jesus normal? Turns out people in this world don't sleep. There is action and conflict and discoveries. But discovering that sleep is not evil is actually not that dramatic for a reader from our world. I think www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-11-17 did it better.

After Zero — The technical part is interesting. It's a geoengineering proposal with a magnetic sunlight deflector at L1. But that's basically it. There is a bit of social commentary, but I'm not a fan. Only a crowdfunding approach works, but then it turns out crowds are dumb, but then the protagonists fight dirty and win. What does this say about democracy or anything? It is definitely not intended as irony, but the competitor in the crowdfunding is a crackpot idea that almost keeps the resources from the right project. I see geoengineering ideas in a similar light. In the story CO2 emissions are already solved with clean energy. (Handwaved.) I'd rather have read a story about how that was done.

Dream Factory — The topic of animal rights is interesting and so are the technical parts. But as a story or a commentary it didn't do it for me.

Light Up The Clouds — The best one! It's maximally Greg Egan. It's from the same cloth as Clockwork Rocket and Incandescence. It's not much connected to sleeping or souls. But it more than makes up for that with orbital mechanics! We're in a binary star system. I never considered how that makes interstellar travel more feasible. Our perspective is from a non-technological non-human civilization that barely knows about stars. The characters are somehow more lovable than the humans in the other stories. We learn a few things about their cool world and it's cool history. By the end it's time to study math, kids! We're fighting a space war. Badass.

Night Running — Pretty cool! I think it keeps your attention because the gimmick raises so many questions. You want to do experiments. And the protagonist does them for you! The gimmick is not exactly a problem we all relate to, but it's a strong parallel to the "subconscious". Another ego in our body that is basically us, but not. Now that I said it like that, it's basically Severance. But somehow that didn't occur to me at all while reading it.

Solidity — Another favorite. It grabs onto a fear we all (or just I) have in our hearts. If we don't see something, is it still there? Just like we remember? We don't even remember everything about it. It could be swapped and we would barely notice. The world falls apart along these lines, with a very strong opening scene set in a high school. The story is long and doesn't really go far from the starting point. But there is a lot of humanity tied up in this fear. Do photos help? Can we still love people? What is money? What is crime? So good. Fantastic story.

I think the ones I liked are the longest ones. Maybe I just need to be immersed long enough to start liking the characters? Or maybe a long story means there's good stuff to write about there?

Fun light-hearted sci-fi. It doesn't aim higher than that but it accomplishes it perfectly. My low rating only reflects that I don't think anyone misses anything if they skip it. But they wouldn't regret reading it either.

It is built from a fantastic batch of components. 1) A colony ship traveling a decade to settle a new planet. 2) The planet is a snowball with hostile life that can bite through steel walls. 3) They fail to grow food and are starving. 4) Mickey's job is to die and be recreated. 5) Every character is a comic on par with The Martian's Mark Watney. 6) Mickey gets accidentally duplicated.

Each of these on their own would be a solid foundation for a story. Combined, they are just a lot of fun!

I'm looking forward to the movie adaptation. I'm hoping they either keep it as light-hearted fun, but it comes off better on film, or they add some ambition and depth and make it all more meaningful.

Very Sherlock Holmes! That part worked really well and made for an enjoyable read.

It's set on Jupiter, but the sci-fi part is not making a lot of difference. Public transport is free, but the weather is bad. People are sad because Earth is gone.

Okay, so it's making some difference. The crime is motivated by the sci-fi part and committed using its tools. But I don't understand it! The three guys stole some seed samples to restart the Earth biosphere. They illegally launched a spaceship to deliver them too. But what's up with Bolien? Why did he go around Jupiter on a suspended railcar? Why did they kill the homeless guy?

I was probably supposed to understand that. But I didn't worry about it too much. The relationship between Mossa and Pleiti was more important to me. There are several differences from Holmes and Watson. Our Watson (Pleiti) knows less. What Mossa is thinking and doing is as much a mystery as the crimes are. They are women. The relationship is more romantic. They think they are an autistic genius and a normal person, but actually they are both autistic geniuses. Otherwise it's the same. Gallons of tea.

If there's another Mossa & Pleiti story coming, I'm going to check it out!

What a ride!

I've read a few urban fantasy books, but stopped reading even more. The genre always appealed to me. I grew up reading World of Darkness TTRPG rulebooks. But most novels I read felt too eager to fulfill fantasies without any care for being a good novel.

I'm not saying this is untrue of The Library at Mount Char. It's also mostly focused on hitting a series of fantastic dioramas with little care for what happens in between. But come on! These dioramas are really cool! And there are so many of them! Just non-stop cool scenes! Everything is over the top. And I mean OVER THE TOP!!!

I think a cornerstone of this genre is wacky situations that must be resolved with a perfectly logical explanation hundreds of pages later. "No time to explain! You must stick this banana in the tiger's ear or we all die!" This is taken to the extreme here. Nothing makes sense in the first 100 pages. I love this formula. (I didn't love that the wacky thing was often torture or murder.)

The conclusion of the plot takes this to the next level, with hidden messages in childhood memories providing the "perfectly logical" explanations. I think that's a perfect way to end the book.

An intention to have a meaning and characters you can connect with are important pillars of a good novel. This novel doesn't have them, at least not for me. Yes, we have a wacky cast of more than a dozen characters with well presented, diverse personalities and other traits. A bloody warrior in a pink tutu, a cunning librarian, a kind naked guy who is used to living with animals, etc. Somehow none of them works as an anchor for the reader. They have plenty of curious traits, plenty of scenes, and still I didn't care about anybody. Everybody is either evil or an idiot. Only Carolyn has a goal. Steve getting hyperfocused on saving Naga is out of the blue, but a valuable emotional motor while it lasts!

That said, this novel works fine without meaning or good characters. There's plenty of that stuff in other books. It's okay to just be a fun ride!

I don't generally read non-fiction books about money or politics. I figure what is true and interesting will percolate to common knowledge sooner or later. The percolation process protects me from conspiracy theories and boredom.

But I never saw an explanation for why CEOs get $100 million salaries. Isn't it weird? Couldn't they find anyone willing to do the job for $10 million? How are these salaries negotiated?

I was hoping this book would give me the answer. It does, but it's even better than that! It reveals a critical part of the American economy that I was unaware of.

The rest of the review is a "spoiler" as I will try to summarize my takeaway. Stop reading if you want to enjoy it first hand. But I promise the book is great either way. As in most non-fiction, there is some repetition and some extra details that you could skip depending on your mood. But it cites really good sources and is a fun short read.

So why do the shareholders pay CEOs so much? What I got from the book is that they have no say in it. They are robbed. The CEO pay is determined by the shareholders' representatives, the board of directors. The shareholders have little say in who represents them. The CEO has a lot of say. The board is made up of other CEOs and top executives. It's a whole class of people that exploit the shareholders and parasitize large corporations. They make up 70% of the top 0.1%!

A lot of things I blamed capitalism and shareholders for — it may actually be the fault of the top executive class. What a revelation!

A tale as old as time. Boring stuff happens, then two people become best friends on a perilous journey.

I'm being unfairly harsh. It's a 70 year old book. I'm unfair to expect novelty. What was novel at its time, I have already seen rehashed a hundred times since. I'm sorry I haven't read it earlier.

I think the first half is boring because there's nothing to care about. The Foretellers sounded like a hook, but they end up on par with an interesting rock. "They commune spiritually and tell the future? Kinda cool, I guess. Anyway..."

The societal aspect is a lot of coverage for two opposed countries. The message seems to be that a powerless monarchy is preferable to an oppressive communist regime. I never felt the need to rank these options, but okay.

Gender. It's pretty cool! It's cool as a gimmick, and it's also cool as a reflection on real-life gender roles. Imagine if we didn't have gender and if two people have sex one would get pregnant at random. It has some effect on Gethenian society and their worldview. But I don't think the story would be much impacted if you removed this and made them normal humans.

The second half is a perilous journey. Nothing really happens other than becoming best friends. And they were good friends already at the start. But it's well written. I started to care for the characters as I followed their struggle.

The setting is interesting! The galaxy seems to be full of human colonies lost for half a million years. The settlers apparently liked to tinker with their genetics too. And now a space-faring empire is rediscovering these colonies without faster-than-light travel. It's pretty cool. But we basically don't see anything of this. The new empire is said to be super nice. Mostly because it cannot really do anything because space is too big. But at least it feels nice to be a part of a galactic empire.

In book 1 you fall in love with Gideon, and in book 2 Gideon is gone. Even deleted from memory. Eventually you fall in love with Harrow, so guess how much Harrow we get in book 3! Once again it's less than none. Is this a pattern? Is this series with non-stop death and skeletons possibly meant to make me think about loss?

Other than Gideon and Harrow, what else was good in the first two books? I guess skeletons, magic, and spaceships were cool. So those are also deleted. Thinking about loss yet?! Hope you like going to school in the projects! Just in case you thought that could be fun, let's delete your capacity to read and write and think complex thoughts. Perfect!

This violent approach to destroying everything the reader loves sounds funny, but it's a huge risk too. It only works if you can again invent a character to fall in love with and a great setting for them. Yep, that happens again. Nona is awesome.

The book is a bit of a slow start. Nothing happens in the first half. (You liked plot? No plot for you!) But Nona & friends are an interesting bunch, so even their everyday lives are pretty cool. The broken-down environment with some magic that nobody cares about and a huge monster looming above the city... Is this [b:Borne|31451186|Borne (Borne, #1)|Jeff VanderMeer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1477487850l/31451186.SX50.jpg|48253660]? The dream sequences start out incomprehensible, but become a pretty exciting infodump very fast.

In all three books the ending was so quick and complex that I forgot them right away. I just finished book 3 and I couldn't tell you what happened beyond that they got to the Locked Tomb. The rest is a dream-like blur. I wonder if this is intended or I just didn't pay enough attention. Anyway, I can't wait for book 4! I hope it comes out this year.


Also on the topic of loss: Gideon is back. She's still talking smack and is kind of funny. But we see her through Nona's eyes now and all the charm is gone. The Gideon we loved is dead! It's her corpse walking. Fantastic work on that. But I'm still rooting for a true resurrection! All I want for book 4 is to just take the 3 characters we love, and put them on stage together! (Nona can be Alecto.)

Everyone opens up Harrow the Ninth after having read Gideon the Ninth and fallen in love with Gideon's character. "Is she okay?" is the only question I wanted to see answered. Does Harrow the Ninth deliver?

No. Gideon is not mentioned for the majority of the book. But it's worse than that. We're actively getting flashbacks to Gideon the Ninth's plot with Gideon erased from it! Fantastic.

The world-building is going strong, there's lot's of drama, bloody action, twists and betrayals. I'm still on board with the series. Every decision on the writer's part is surprising and fun. This book was a typical 2nd book and a bit of a filler. Is the story going anywhere? Probably yes, but I also don't really care. I'm here for lewd necromancers in space, and I don't think this series will run out of those.

PS: Haha, some great quotes:

At this, there was a fractional relaxing of Mercymorn's frowzled brow: not relief, but the germination of the seed of relief.

Old people should be shot.

It was not the way of the Ninth House to pray with such wilful credulousness; yet you prayed all the while knowing Ianthe's facility for tergiversation would have given the whole universe pause.

So I'm shut in here—walled in, really— to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_pizza_with_left_beef)