Reviews and Comments

Ann Leckie is back! I loved [b:Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)|Ann Leckie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397215917l/17333324.SY75.jpg|24064628] for its unique perspective (an AI on a spaceship that controls a company of brain-implanted soldiers) and quietly unfolding politics.

The Raven Tower is exactly the same thing! The narrator is a billion-years-old god. We have politics with several human and godly factions. It's all made up of personal connections. And it's all laid out in quiet conversation.

These conversations are fantastic. Everyone is quite reluctant to give anything away. But as they probe each other, you see what they are interested in, what they know and what they do not know. Eolo, the main human character, is especially good at polite conversation where he conceals everything he knows.

The political plot is quite tricky. I understand most of it, but still have some questions. (Why did the Strength and Patience of the Hill promise to fulfill petitions at all?) As it should be!

But one more word about the writing. Just the prose is somehow so calming. The two main characters are both extremely patient. It seems that even the words are somehow made more patient by their presence. There are some action scenes, but even that is somehow made stoic. I read it while I was sick and found this especially resting.

Such an uplifting read! It managed to scratch my space opera itch.

We're in space. Lots of aliens in a galactic alliance. Everyone breathes the same atmosphere and is roughly the same size. Artificial gravity, faster-than-light travel. Your normal "let's not get creative here" setting.

Where the creative part comes in is the cast and the plot. We're on the Wayfarer, a spaceship for digging "sublayer" tunnels, through which FTL traffic can flow from one star system to another. The crew of nine includes five humans, three aliens and an AI.

With a few exceptions everyone is super nice. The captain is a pacifist. They carry no weapons. They story is mainly a road trip to a "small, angry planet". They run into conflicts at times, but these are never settled with force. They don't outwit or otherwise defeat the enemy either. They just come to an agreement or find a legal solution.

I love this book for this. I mean how many times in your life have you been in a conflict? How often was it resolved by force or cunning? Way less often than in novels or films. So this is a nice change of pace.

The story is a bit like a collection of short stories about these characters. You could probably swap around some chapters without anyone noticing. It's not a bad thing. There is not a strong overarching plot or big twists. But still it was a satisfying read. The stories are interesting enough.

I was in the mood for some space opera, and Bradley Horner rated The Outside very highly. I didn't like it.

The book is set in an interesting future. Powerful AI "gods" rule over humanity in the role of omnipotent benefactors. Computers are forbidden technology for humans. The AIs seems to have invented all the sci-fi staples, like artificial gravity and faster-than-light travel. Brain implants, cybernetic limbs, an FTL communication network, portals, gene-manipulated shapeshifters.

It's curious that they did this, because they seem not very intelligent at all. I'm not even convinced they exist. They have an extensive hierarchy of human representatives ("angels"). Every angel has a boss and is afraid of their performance review. The boss can be petty or take undue credit.

This duality of a superintelligence that discovers artificial gravity but relies on bickering middle-managers is quite interesting. A possible explanation is the horrifying idea that an AI would become just intelligent enough to enslave humanity, but would have no motivation to go any further. We would be stuck on a level of technology not because further progress is hard or unfeasible, but because the damn AI doesn't share our desire for progress.

But I think this duality is accidental in this book. It's just a pile of sci-fi ideas. Some are original and some are interesting, but none of it seems to be there for a good reason. None of them are expanded and investigated deeply. They are all just set pieces. I mean we have a living fish that can fly through space, land on a planet, and take off from the planet. It has a room inside for passengers and a door on the side.

Unfortunately the titular Outside gets no more of an in-depth treatment. Throughout the book it remains a boogieman. Chaotic, otherworldly energies, geometries that the human mind cannot comprehend. I mean that's an okay description in a short story. But here we have the main character research this Outside throughout the book. She is a physicist. A physicist would not feel paralyzing dread when faced with incomprehensible phenomena. She would be overjoyed! Finally something outside of the standard model!

In the end I think the book is just a fun romp in a crazy colorful sci-fi setting. Flying fish, cybernetic angels, cosmic horror. Everything is just one more color in this space adventure.

I think I could be on board with that. But the plot! Everything is so silly. I've got to tell you one example!


They are looking for an extremely dangerous person responsible for destroying entire colonies with Outside energies and monsters. They have found her and put a plan in place. Two people, an angel and the reluctant main character fly there. This takes months, but still fortunately the terrorist's spaceship is right there.

The angel boards the ship and has a conversation with the terrorist. He's worried about Outside portals through which the terrorist could escape, but he doesn't see any. He has an implant to block out Outside things, so that they don't drive him crazy. He sees a big blocked-out thing on a wall, but decides it's surely not a portal. Spoiler: it is a portal.

Anyway, he's just distracting the terrorist. The main character in the meanwhile climbs on the outside of the spaceship and places a lot of anti-matter bombs. She gets busted and the anti-matter bombs presumably removed. But this was all part of the plan! The real attack is in her footprints. Her boots were coated in a substance that stuck to the spaceship's outside. It can be remotely detonated for a huge explosion.

But before they would do that, the terrorist of course goes for the portal. The angel is prepared though! He activates the self destruct on his tablet and throws it at the terrorist. Alas, too late.

I mean why didn't they just blow up the whole ship right at the start? Just throw one of those boots at it! Or bring a space fighter instead of a shuttle with two people and no guns. It's just wild, isn't it? Why was this the plan?

Wow, I really didn't like this book.

The premise is great. The world is overrun by zombies. Has been for decades. People live in high-security cities. Everyone is paranoid about outbreaks. Our heroes are not soldiers or secret agents or detectives or scientists. They are bloggers. They are not uncovering the big secret behind the zombie plague or how it can be reversed or an alien invasion or anything "usual" like that. They are covering an election. So cool!

I especially like the scientific explanation and mechanics for the zombies. A protection for the common cold and a cure for cancer combined in unforeseen ways. Everyone is infected! Nobody gets cancer or the common cold. But when anyone dies, the virus activates and they become a zombie. You don't need to be bitten. Have a heart attack and come back a zombie! Of course any contact with the activated virus also activates your infection. If you get bitten, you become a zombie without needing to die first. This is fantastic!

Great ideas. But the execution really fell flat for me.

I think we don't usually get SFF books about bloggers and political campaigns because it's hard to find what makes these people and events exciting. I'm sure they are as exciting for the people living it as debugging a fascinating bug is for me (a programmer). But someone on the outside would have a hard time relaying that excitement. Unfortunately the book felt like someone who has never been close to a newsroom or a campaign trying to do this. "Quick, we have to publish this article!" "Look at the reader numbers!" "We are polling 1% higher now!" This layperson's impression of the world of news and politics is absolutely not enough to sustain a book even if you throw in zombies.

Due to this the book is boring. I read it very slowly. I'm okay with leaving books unfinished, but a zombie book two-thirds through? How could that be boring? I powered through, but it was boring.

The writing is just bad. "Poke/prod a zombie with a stick" is found on pages 9, 10, 108, 183, 280, 300, 324, and 452. I'm not counting the cases where someone actually prods a zombie with a stick. It's just the times when the recklessness/bravery of someone (Shaun) is light-heartedly described. I had too much of this joke on page 10. By page 452 I cannot imagine any reader chuckling along.

Another extremely repetitive scene is the blood test. You get tested when you enter an elevator. You get tested when you leave the elevator. There are very expensive single-use test units. But why?! The virus acts in a few minutes. The tests take a few minutes. A zombie cannot blend in with humans. It seems like you could just hold people up for a few minutes without a test and just see if they turn. I should have counted the number of blood tests described in the book. Maybe a hundred? None of them reveal anything unexpected!

The character interactions are nonsensical. Most importantly the interview with Tate, a presidential candidate. Georgia (the hero) acts a bit silly arriving intentionally 10 minutes late, because she thinks the chief of staff would make her wait 30 minutes otherwise. There is no chief of staff though, she just enters Tate's office directly. Tate doesn't make a big deal out of her being late, but she feels pretty smug about how her plan worked. (?) Then they discuss some policy questions like whether or not you can breed horses. (All large mammals are infected and become zombies on death.)

After that interview, they hate each other. It seems like the author wanted to write a scene where Georgia outsmarts Tate and produces an embarrassing interview. Tate holds a grudge for this. But there was nothing embarrassing in the interview. I've re-read it now. Seriously there's nothing.
Tate's unexplained grudge holds throughout the story and he is revealed at the end to be a cartoon villain serial killer.

Another example. Our heroes have just found a data stick hidden by a dead character.

"The plot thickes," I said. "Shaun, Becks used to be a Newsie. How's she with computers?"
"Not as good as Buffy-"
"No one's as good as Buffy."
"But she's good."
"Good enough?"
"One one way to find out." He held out his hand. I gave him the data stick without a moment's hesitation. The day I couldn't trust Shaun, it was over. Simple as that.

They are talking about whether someone is "good enough" to stick a USB stick in a computer and look at the files. But it's page 512. Georgia (the narrator) and Shaun are siblings and super (super) close. We have seen them do everything together and ready to give their lives for each other. Why would you not trust him to hand over a USB stick to another person?! I mean, she trusts him "without a moment's hesitation". But why write this down? I trust my wife without a moment's hesitation when she hands me a pen. Should I make note of that...?

These weird character interactions led me to grow to hate each character. They all think so very very differently from me. Or they are just badly written. This is a debut novel. So maybe that's okay, and later novels from Mira Grant are great? She's got awesome ideas and writing can improve with experience.

Super awesome! The best book I read this year.

I think it's best if you go in knowing nothing. It's a sci-fi about soldiers. I used a notebook to track the plot but it's not really necessary. And it's really good. That should be enough.

Anyway, I'll write down why I love it. I won't spoil any twists, but I will necessarily tell more of what the book is about.


It's a time-travel story. It probably says so on the back cover, so this is not much of a spoiler. But still I think it's best if you don't know. The main character doesn't know. She just sees weird stuff and people think she's weird. It takes a while for her to realize what's happening. She's making random jumps in time. This is why I used a notebook to track where we were on the world's timeline. It's weird and it's a fantastic plot device.

What I didn't expect was the excellent critique of capitalism. I've read a lot of cyberpunk that go "oh, those greedy corporations!" and "look at the poor people in the slums eating trash!". I'm okay with that setting, but they never really explained what's wrong with capitalism. You could have pollution and inequality and discrimination and poverty in any other social structure just as well.

The Light Brigade is also set in a capitalist dystopia. But Kameron Hurley does explain what's wrong with capitalism. It's so good. It had a real effect on how I view capitalism.

Cool! So it's a book full of time travel and a take down of capitalism, right? No, actually it's not. All the characters are foot soldiers. The book is full of shooting at an enemy you cannot see, running to cover, carrying your bleeding friends around, and shouting for medics. They are not even your friends because of shared interests, a common understanding, or a moral alignment. They are idiots who you would not agree with on anything. But you've been through bootcamp together. And they are the only ones still alive. So they are your friends and you carry them when they bleed.

Time travel, capitalism is bad, war is bad. I don't think the recipe is that simple. Would you get a fantastic book each time you mix those ingredients? There is surely more to what makes The Light Brigade so good, but I can't say what it is. Read it and tell me!

It's not a bad swords & sorcery book. But I expected more than that.

What is supposed to set it apart from a million other fantasy adventures is the concept of Roles. Being a Lone Swordsman or an Heiress is not just a cliche here. It has tremendous power. The force of narrative compels people and makes miracles possible.

That sounds great. I was so excited for the clever twists this setup allows! And maybe this series goes there and it's awesome. But after reading the first book and part of the second I can tell you that if it does go there, it's taking a slow and scenic route. I felt like the whole first book was just filler. Sure, you want to introduce characters, build up relationships, etc. And it's not boring. Exciting things happen throughout. But I came here to read about cool uses and abuses of Names! There was too little of that for me.

I read it right after reading [b:Sufficiently Advanced Magic|34403860|Sufficiently Advanced Magic (Arcane Ascension, #1)|Andrew Rowe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1488182235l/34403860.SY75.jpg|55506810] and its sequel. So that was my baseline. I loved it. It has way more cool twists on cliches. And I even liked the Young Adult stuff better there. A Practical Guide to Evil could be enjoyable as a fun adventure, but that is marred by what I thought was a dose of unnecessarily gruesome violence.

It's a cool book for a number of reasons. The prose is awesome. It walks the spectrum from vulgar to pretentious and back to paint the city of Camorr and its people that walk the same spectrum. Scott Lynch has a talent for words. The text evokes the smells and moods and it is helped by the wonderful names.

For me the made-up names are important. I value the names that are not cliche fantasy names, that feel like they have logic and history behind them, and that sound good in the end. Camorr, Talisham, Emberlain, Capa Barsavi, Don Lorenzo Salvara, Doña Sofia, Lukas Fehrwight, etc. Great names! They have a basis in real-world languages, and they are more evocative for that.

The world that's built has a strong original atmosphere, but functionally it's mostly a generic dark medieval fantasy. There's a lot of detail about geography and cuisine and politics and herbs and a lot of elderglass. But the only novelty in terms of its effects is magic. The magic practiced by the Bondsmagi appears to be extremely rare (suggesting that some apparent impossibility might be the work of a Bondsmage will get you laughed at) and practically limitless. They are like gods for hire. This is a strange setup, and while it's not examined too deeply in this first book, it's enough to get you thinking.

The structure of the book with interludes and occasional changes of viewpoints is okay. It keeps things interesting.

So how's the plot and the characters? I thought it would be a bit better. Locke is this super thief. He proves that as a child, he proves that with the Salvaras. But then he stops being clever. Okay, he cannot do much against a Bondsmage. But why summon the mage just to get tortured? Why believe that the Gray King told him the true plan for the Echo Hole meeting? Why believe that the Salvaras wanted to invite him to the Raven's Reach party out of their fondness for him? Did he forget that they knew he was robbing them? He told them so!

In the end of course he still wins. Is it because he starts being clever again? He does start being clever for a hundred pages when he's got to get a fancy suit. But beyond that he's just relying on deus ex machina to get him through the hard times. Why would he not, if it works so well! Half-dead and never a competent fighter, he still manages to beat the main villain and long-time pirate captain in hand-to-hand combat.

We have a crew of old friends doing amazing heists together and bantering non-stop. Loyalty and friendship are big themes. Yet 60% of the crew gets killed off without much reason. They knew they would likely be attacked and their plan was to just sit at home with all their treasure and wait? It's like the author forgot about Calo and Galdo when writing the ending and he fixed it by going back through the draft and killing them off off-screen after their last mention.


I felt that much of the good and the bad that happened to Locke was not fairly deserved. It was a fun read though when I was not overthinking the plot.

This was all right. The first book had a nicer structure I think. A beginning and an end. It of course ended in a high-stakes fight for the fate of the world.

Then the next day we are back to school. Infodumps about magic that does not fit into the world's magic system. (I liked the magic system! I barely had time to learn it. It's just the second book. Do we already need to step beyond it?) Teenage banter and drama. Exams.

None of it is bad. It just feels like the author is thinking, "Oh, finally, I can just ramble on about anything. How nice it is not to be rushed. I had a lot of ideas that were squeezed out from the first book."

But there's lots of good parts. The exams are always exciting. There are awesome fights. Cool new items and abilities. We learn a lot about what's going on in the world. Progress on Corin's backstory. Bunch of cool new characters. I enjoyed it alright.

I don't think I have read any LitRPG before. From this one sample it looks like this genre works for me!

Yes, it's very much like someone is playing a video game. More than half the book is about how much mana they have, how far they are from reaching the next level, what spells they can cast, what equipment they are carrying, monsters, secret doors, dungeon puzzles, traps, color-coded keys...

But then the main character has more freedom than you do in a video game. And they make constant use of that. What if I make a lasso from my rope? What if I bottle up some water from the magical fountain? What if I try chatting with the monster?

I know you can do all that in a tabletop RPG too. And I think the book is based on an actual RPG campaign. But it has a few advantages over an RPG: 1) you can read it alone, 2) you don't have to put in any creativity, 3) it's distilled down to the good parts, and 4) it's set in a pretty cool original world.

The world looks like a typical fantasy at a glance. Elementalists, summoners, healers, nobles, kingdoms, magic weapons, monsters, goddesses. And the protagonist goes to magic school. They have quirky professors and exciting exams. There's magical dodgeball.

Like Harry Potter. But like in The Methods of Rationality, our hero is super cautious and super inquisitive. And when you scratch the surface, everything has cool original explanations. Where does magic come from? Where do monsters come from?

More than that, everyone is a bit of a rationalist here. You can patent enchantments. A mana-powered train crosses the continent. Magical research and experiments are everywhere.

Magical research into the very nature of magic and the immortals of the world is at the heart of the plot too. It seems like a great plot, lot's of mysteries to unravel. With so much going on we don't get very far in the unraveling before the book ends. But it sets up the story very nicely for the later volumes.

There's a cast of characters too. A lot of pages are filled with their funny banter and teenage drama. It's not very ambitious (I don't expect a stage adaptation), but I found it quite enjoyable.

It is a good overview of world history. I really enjoyed the parts that were new to me. I didn't know the story of the fall of the Aztec Empire. I didn't know that China and India were significantly ahead of Europe economically in 1500 and I didn't know why they failed to jump into the Industrial Revolution. I liked the chapters that explained shifting perspectives.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces – one indication of the development of the scientific mindset, as well as of the European imperial drive. The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world.

Anyone looking at the map and possessing even minimal curiosity is tempted to ask, ‘What’s beyond this point?’ The map gives no answers. It invites the observer to set sail and find out .

But a lot of it was not new to me. I'm interested in these topics! So I've already read much about them on Wikipedia, thought about them, and discussed them with friends and strangers. Many of those friends and strangers had already read Sapiens. So I had already absorbed much of the content.

This seems to be my general problem with non-fiction on topics that I am actively interested in. I've already sought out much of what's in the book and this makes it a bit boring to read. Perhaps I'm drawn to sci-fi and fantasy because they at least guarantee something I haven't seen before.

Only forty years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy – that’s what E = mc² means – and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.

Nit: Atom bombs don't convert mass to energy. I expect it will be thousands of years before we can harness E = mc² for energy production. (See "Are Black Hole Starships Possible" for a vision of how this might work.) Of course the statement is easily fixed if we replace Einstein with Marie Curie.

It's great. No hard feelings for writing this instead of the next Stormlight Archive book!

It's a pretty safe endeavour of course. Harry Potter but with space fighter pilots instead of wizards. I can see absolutely no way this could have been a disappointment. Perhaps it could have been too macho? But this is Brandon Sanderson. He is a master of his craft and appears to have picked this setting exactly to have a discussion about machismo. We have a female protagonist, a female villain, and the central topic is bravery and cowardice.

The detailed list of ingredients:
- A lot of dogfighting against alien spaceships. The ships have some interesting quirks that keep these action sequences fresh. But, wow, there is a lot of dogfighting!
- A lot of personal relationships and their evolution. I easily get impatient with relationships when I feel like they are keeping me from learning more of the plot. But here it felt fine. Great characters all around and you get to like everyone in the end.
- A solid plot. A few pages in, there is a shocking twist. Spensa's father was shot down for deserting. Ten years later we still have no answers. What happened? Why? This mystery works very well because it ties so strongly to the bravery/cowardice theme.
- Worldbuilding. It is comparable to Stormlight Archive in that in general shape and form it resembles a generic sci-fi (or fantasy) world, but then every detail is a fresh original idea.
- Humor. While there is a fair amount of tragedy, there is also some quality goofing around. Let me add some quotes:

I’d like to point out that the true coward’s weapon is a comfortable couch and a stack of mildly amusing novels.

Thanks Brandon! You think I would be reading your books if flying starfighters against the Krell were also an option? (Yeah, okay, I guess I would.)

“That’s probably some irrational human confirmation bias speaking,” he noted. “But my subroutine that can simulate appreciation . . . is appreciative.”

I nodded.

“That’s kind of what it does,” he added. “Appreciate things.”

“I would never have figured.”

M-Bot (an AI) is brilliantly written and a non-stop source of comedy. He can be thought-provoking too:

“I’m afraid of death now,” M-Bot said softly as we flew.

“What?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

“I wrote a subroutine,” he said. “To simulate the feeling of fearing death. I wanted to know.”

“That was stupid.”

“I know. But I can’t turn if off, because I’m more afraid of that. If I don’t fear death, isn’t that worse?”

Summerland has a fantastic setting! London after World War I with access to the afterlife recently discovered. England has already colonized it (what else would you expect of them) but the Russians have built a God so there is a cold war and tensions in Spain. The afterlife is four-dimensional with mysteries surrounding us in both of the new directions. Oh and all the characters are spies.

It's so imaginative! I love this setting. Comparatively, [b:The Quantum Thief|7562764|The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1)|Hannu Rajaniemi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327950631s/7562764.jpg|9886333] had a very constrained setting. The Quantum Thief is hard sci-fi, respecting physical laws and filled with extrapolations from existing technologies. Summerland has no such constrains. Anything goes here!

How is it then that The Quantum Thief is so colorful while Summerland feels relatively bland? In The Quantum Thief a digitized human mind is smuggled in the crystal lattice of a chocolate sculpture. It's poetry!

At the same time Summerland seems even intentionally bland. People in the afterlife use public transportation and elevators. They go to work every day. You could remove all the fantastic elements and the plot would work the same!

The most obvious quirk of the afterlife is that someone can die and get there, right? But nobody dies in the entire book! Some people die but they don't appear in the afterlife. There are other quirks that you would expect to make a difference. Like ghosts can go through walls and cannot be followed, right? All these are countered through various means. That's interesting from a world-building perspective, but means that all the fantastic elements make no difference to the plot. You would also think you cannot die once you've died, right? Well, here you can. Ghosts can be killed and there's no second afterlife. There's really no practical difference between the living and dead characters in this book, which is super weird.

So how did I like it other than that? I liked it fine! The main character is very well developed. Between the male author and the male reader it's hard to say with any authority, but she was life-like to me and the story seemed to touch on gender issues thoughtfully. I don't know about you, but I try not to dwell on thoughts about death. But this book is an entertaining way to visit some otherwise grim thoughts. And even if I wish it had more impact on the story, the world-building is genius. I can imagine a lot of super cool stories in this setting!