Reviews and Comments

The first two books described the century-old setting of the Scholomance. Our protagonists are children. The expectation is that the status quo will be preserved at the end. The ending of book 2 made it clear that this was not how this story goes. But how much will be changed?

The first two books already had some head-spinning moments, where our perspective shifted as we learned something about the world. E.g. finding out how New Yorkers felt about Orion. There's more of that in the last book! I love the way it's done, because the clues were there from way earlier. When did you realize?

Leaving the Scholomance is a huge change. The school gave the first two books so much charm. I was worried leaving it behind. But it works out fine. I still miss the school, but the interactions with the mundane world and the adult wizards make up for it.

So the plot is fantastic, the mystery is perfect, the ending is satisfying. Great. But it's the characters that deserve the most praise. Yeah, there's an evil sorcerer going around destroying the oldest strongholds of magic. I don't care! I only care about saving Orion! We've got to save Orion! I can't focus on the plot until I know Orion is safe!

Superb work!

Apparently Brandon Sanderson decided that filling the last 300 pages with a complex and desperate fight in the previous books was not enough. This time the complex and desperate fight fills the last 1100 pages. It takes place on multiple fronts too.

Sadly, these fronts interact little with each other. You could technically separate each location into its own book and read the stories that way. They still lend "dramatic" support to each other I guess. But it makes it natural to review each place separately!

Adolin: Cool action, cool characters, very satisfying conclusion. Everyone's favorite. ★★★★★

Kaladin, Syl, and Szeth: A road trip with chatting and fighting. It's an important story for the world, but it's not that interesting. What is super interesting and very well presented is Szeth's flashbacks. I thought for sure Szeth was irredeemable! And then Brandon Sanderson pulls this. Szeth is the best. ★★★★★

Dalinar and Navani: This is like an infodump. Just directly telling us what happened. Just absolutely pulling the veil from everything. But Sanderson had a few ideas to spice it up! We're in the spiritual realm. We don't know who is who. We have secondary objectives. (Get next anchor. Keep together.) Assassins! Wrathful gods! The best infodump ever! The info itself that is revealed is also perfect. Direct answers to everything we wanted to know, but so many new questions! What's that about Taln trying to kill Cultivation??? The conclusion for Dalinar is unexpected, but I trust Sanderson with it. UNITE THEM! ★★★★★

Shallan, Renarin, and Rlain: Not actually separate from Dalinar's story, but deserves a separate mention. Sneaking around in the spiritual realm is some next level spy thriller. I love how they track down Ba-Ado-Mishram's prison, and the whole Ba-Ado-Mishram story is so cool. Renarin and Rlain are perfect for this job, and everyone gets an exciting conclusion. ★★★★★

Sigzil and Venli: Some nice character building, nice action, nice conclusions. ★★★★☆

Jasnah: So interesting. We haven't spent much time with Jasnah before, and she's just this perfect scholar and general for us because everyone sees her like that. And she sees herself like that. I'm afraid the most important person does not see her like that: Brandon Sanderson. Sorry, Jasnah! ★★★★☆

Interludes: Tanavast's interludes were (intentionally) pretentious and sparing with revelations. But some interludes were very cool, like Rysn or the Iriali. ★★★★★

Just freeze me until the next book please!

I'm a Stormlight Archive fan. I read this before Wind & Truth and I think it was great this way. This way you don't know who the protagonist is, which just fuels your curiosity.

The book has the usual enjoyable ingredients. Cool action, cool characters, cool setting with cool mysteries. Heroics and drama abound. It's very isolated from the rest of the Cosmere and stands well on its own.

The LitRPG aspect is minimal, and kind of funny. In a usual LitRPG you watch as the character's stats go up. Well, not this time.

The book has a few pictures, which are nice. But even without those, I would get a very strong mental imagery from the text. It's just a very visual book for me. Almost monochromatic, the whole book is set at night and illuminated only by cinderhearts, storms, and explosions. There's a lot of action and it's all very unique due to a limitation of the protagonist. It would make such a cool movie!

I found a lot to criticize in Revelation Space. But my overall impression is that the author wouldn't even care. He had an idea (or a bunch) and he was going to write it up, no matter what. There's this unrepentant feeling about it and I think it's great.

To be more specific, in a lot of fiction things are the way they are for a reason. Everything lives to serve the plot. You don't just write things because they are cool. Not unless you are Alastair Reynolds! The plot is very complex, but it's not a "justified" complexity. It's a "check out these cool ideas" complexity.

I thought the characters were pretty crazy and unlikable. With the possible exception of [REDACTED]! [REDACTED] is painted as a dangerous madman, but only in a "tell, don't show" way. Everybody fears him, but he doesn't do anything. I got a kick out of imagining that he's perfectly normal and the rest of the crew is just paranoid.

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.