Reviews and Comments

With trilogies set in imaginative fantastic universes I always worry. The first book was fantastic because it introduced this universe. But is there anything left to introduce? Will book two be just plot set in a now-familiar universe?

Thankfully, there is plenty left to introduce here. We learn a great deal about the world. A lot of hints at what may really be going on. Lovely.

But at the same time, what happened to the plot?! In the first book we were jumping all around the map. Yumenes, Tirimo, Allia, Meov, Castrima, and lots of travel. This time, everyone is just sitting in one place. We have two threads, so two places total. And nothing much happens in those places. We get like one new character.

The pages fill out somehow, and there are some cool fights. But still in the end I feel like nothing important happened in the present. (Except for the ending.) In flashbacks and conversations we learn a great deal of the past. Secrets are revealed. And we are set up for book three.

On a positive note, while some children still get murdered, it's much less tragic than in the first book.

Plus I'm getting intrigued by the oppressive mood. Take for example Lerna, a doctor who is in love with the main character. He is a very gentle, caring, and reliable person. Why am I afraid of him?! Is this what it is like to be a woman? (In a violent fantasy world? In real life?) Just because he takes an interest in her, he is a threat.

I liked the first book best. A fascinating original world, where every oddity is explained by more oddities from the past. I love these layered worlds. But here we finally hit the bottom layer. The explanation is still "weird stuff and cruelty", but it's no longer supported by anything further below.

Sorry, I can't discuss this in depth without massive spoilers. Of course if you've read the first two books, there is no reason not to read the third. But if you've only read the first, I would forgive you for stopping there.

A random collection of gripes follows.


We find out (too late) that Hoa can take Essun anywhere and he also knows where Nassun is. Essun's only goal is to find Nassun. So she asks Hoa to take her to... a completely different place that has no importance at all. Huh?

Book 2 said there were three factions, and even Stone Eaters were divided. The books don't much focus on these political divisions, but since they are important to understanding the plot, I expected a bit more explanation. A serious fan can probably read between the lines and figure this out. But I'm lost. What were these factions and why?

Hoa wanted to put the Moon back. Essun just went along with it because Hoa said it was a good thing and she loved him because he appeared as a weird kid one time. Why trust Hoa? For all she knew the Moon could have been the villain. Or the Earth was the villain and the Moon tried to break free. Or the Evil Earth gets its strength back and kills humanity if it gets the Moon back. Or the Stone Eaters get super strong and wipe us out. I mean so many explanations would be consistent with what little she knew. In many of those, catching the Moon would be really bad. But just one or two people giving her no explanation at all was enough to convince her to put her life on the line?

Likewise on Nassun's side. She's sad and wants to destroy the world. Steel and Schaffa just go along. They barely seem interested in even learning what she plans to do. "Oh, I've escorted you to the end of the world so you could destroy it? Whatever, do what you like. My head hurts anyway."

Essun and Nassun never stop to discuss their respective plans. Both just assume that their daughter/mother wants to do something super stupid. They start to fight it out, then Essun goes "I'm still sure you want to do something stupid, but you know what? Have at it." then Nassun goes "You would like that, wouldn't you?" but of course by then Essun is dead. I mean I'd have preferred them to have valid reasons for what they were doing and then engage in a discussion of those reasons. Either verbally, or through their actions. But it didn't feel like the clash of two philosophies or value systems or personalities. They both seemed to be more driven by the forces of the plot than by human nature.

We also got a full explanation of the Shattering and the Stone Eaters and Evil Earth. I liked Syl Anagist. I think it's neat how they hold life sacred, but use it as a building material. That's a pretty solid basis for subverting the picture of a utopia.

But instead the main evil of Syl Anagist is the genocide of the Niess. I should not be surprised when a series where the central themes are genocide, genocide, and genocide ends with the revelation that it has all started with genocide. But this is where I felt like this line of explanations has bottomed out.

We do get to know the young Stone Eaters a bit. I really only got to know Hoa and Kelenli. And they are pretty simple too. Kelenli hates being treated as a tool and teaches Hoa to hate it as well. The other tuners I'm not sure about. And at the end when they are Stone Eaters supporting Essun vs Nassun? The two sides barely express themselves and never engage in discourse. They just eat/dismember each other.

Hoa wants to fix everything, and Steel would rather destroy it. There's a lot to talk about! And the books have already talked about a lot of that. Not through the words of the Stone Eaters or the main characters, but through the events in the world, and the examination of how people behave under strain. But I think if these focal point characters are meant to be avatars of ideas, I would have liked them to be more vocal of those ideas.

I like the Evil Earth plot. Syl Anagist just saw a ton of power there and built a device to extract it. I don't think they deserve to be depicted as evil just for this. Perhaps they should have checked if there is a sentient being there, but there is no indication that they knew there was and still went ahead with the extraction.

Anyway, it's pretty cool, and I like how the Evil Earth is quick enough to sabotage the plan! And then we find the answers to the two big questions: what happened to the Moon and where did the Stone Eaters come from. And the answer is basically, "no reason". The Moon was just a random accident. Nobody intentionally flung it from orbit, it's just a random outcome of two kinds of sabotage and the original plan colliding. And the Earth just turned the tuners into Stone Eaters as punishment or something.

They are not terrible explanations, but nobody could have predicted these. I don't very much enjoy a mystery where the answer is revealed to be random chance.

I'm sure many more careful readers have predicted these and felt great when their predictions turned out to be accurate! But it was not even in my search space. Who goes and thinks, "You know what could explain how the Moon was removed from orbit? I bet it was a random accident! That would be so cool!"


I feel much better already! Thanks for hearing me complain!

The world-building is great. It is like Brandon Sanderson. Things that happened hundreds and thousands of years ago led to the strange world we see today. Gradually uncovering the secrets of the distant past really drew me in. No way I could stop after the first book.

It has an excellent structure too. Chapters from the lives of three main characters (Damaya, Syenite, Essun) are interlaced. (Do not read spoiler if you plan to read the book: They are really three parts of one woman's life. Felt great when I figured that out!)

It has a unique style. All present tense and one of the characters is in second person. By the third book I have entirely gotten used to it, but it felt out of place at first. The style is also intentionally loose at times:

But you need context. Let’s try the ending again. Writ continentally.
Here is a land.
It is ordinary, as lands go. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual. Ordinary, except for its size and its dynamism. It moves a lot, this land. Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows. Naturally this land’s people have named it the Stillness. It is a land of quiet and bitter irony.

Three books in, I have not found a reason for this style. We eventually learn that the narrator is one of the characters. But he has no reason for this style. The intention may be to distance it from typical fantasy. To me it more often felt like trying to be edgy.

There is a lot of violence against children. Up to torture and murder. While it certainly has an emotional effect, I think I would have been fine with a little less. The whole atmosphere is very depressing. All the characters are broken beyond redemption. (Or dead.) This makes it a harder read than necessary. I'm sure this is intentional, and I admit it's interesting.

It's one of the best combinations of sci-fi and fantasy. If you like it, try Caves of Qud!

It's free on the author's website! Fantastically generous! Thanks a lot!

It's also a great book. It feels like someone's first book: it is stuffed full of ideas one must have collected over a lifetime. (I've checked now and it's far from Peter Watts' first book. He must have saved up a lot of ideas!)

I think the hard sci-fi "first contact" is my favorite genre. I'm always so thrilled! Almost always I'm let down at the end though. The author has not really met aliens. I'm still just reading a human's thoughts.

But Blindsight did it for me. The interactions are very clever. The whole plot is so clever, half of it I didn't understand. I've discussed it with a friend who recommended it and together we have been unable to figure out the answer to a lot of questions. I'm pretty sure there are answers, but this is still a slight negative. Even so there's so much in the book that I am fine without those answers.

I love the technical details, like the initial radio conversations with the alien station or the alien prison break. The focus of the story and the best part of the book though is the meditation on the role of consciousness. Vampires, AI, brain surgery, aliens. All that is about consciousness. Consciousness is what makes humans what we are. We never stop to think about intelligence and consciousness separately, until we read Blindsight. This topic will stay with me and makes for very interesting conversations.

I liked the first two books for plunging me into a very imaginative world of calendrical warfare and exotic effects. Impossibly, the third books still keeps revealing fantastic new information. This time it's about Moths, the spaceships of this world.

Also any questions we had about the nature and origin of Kujen and the Heptarchate / Hexarchate are nicely answered.

A way this book is even better than the first two is the symmetry of the plot. We have Jedao fighting Jedao.

I read it two months ago, so I don't remember a lot of detail, but let me share two passages I highlighted:

There’s an algorithm for fast factorization. The trick is, it relies on exotic effects—and those effects require a nonstandard calendar.

(Explanation for why the protagonist was chanting and meditating to hack a computerized lock.)

She remembered overseeing the servitors changing his diapers.

(Whereas today the big sister would remember changing the little brother's diapers herself, here she remembers the domestic robots doing it. Of course.)

Either it was at book three that I started to get in the mood for this series. Or it's at book three that Pierce Brown started to get better at writing and plot. There are quite a few bits I liked.

Crabs skittering over the corpses, making meals of the dead, as a lone ribbon of smoke twirled and twirled up to the stars, the old soundless echo of war.

Poetic!

When the assault forces land to take back the military spire and the Needles, they’ll leave their shuttles behind in those hangars. Sevro will descend from his hiding place, hijack the shuttles, and return them home to their ships, packed with all the Sons we have left.

Clever!

Justice isn’t about fixing the past, it’s about fixing the future.

Wise!

For at least a part of the book, the hero is not the best fighter in the universe. They have spent a year in a table. They have been outed as a Red and now wear a surgically modified body for no reason. (Well, it does make them a superhuman body-builder at least.) This works surprisingly well! I expected the disguised life among the enemy to be more thrilling and dramatic than it was. This un-disguised life among friends, however, turns out surprisingly thrilling and dramatic! Who leads the Sons of Ares now? How do we actually build a better world by blowing things up? Good stuff.

The ending is really satisfying and well done! Finally a twist that is pulled off correctly and does not feel cheap. It's awesome!

I read the whole trilogy in the end. It's not too bad!

I liked how the first book set off quickly. After having read Wool, I was ready to spend the whole book gradually learning what lies behind the propaganda. But slow investigation is not what this book is about.

A couple pages later, and we are in "school", in a Hunger Games battle that lasts months. It is a testosterone overdose dreamscape. All the boys are superhuman invincible body-builders. All the girls are supermodel damsels in distress. All the action is medieval. The sci-fi disappears while we watch this battle royale where everyone is just fighting with swords on horseback.

Already the worst part of the series is evident in a way. The hero is the best at everything and always wins. But that would be boring, right? So sometimes he makes a dumb mistake for no good reason other than regretting it for the rest of the series. Pax

These mistakes felt so out of place to me. He's the best fighter, best tactician, best strategist, best friend, etc. Why walk into an ambush that the reader can recognize from miles away?

That's how I recall it anyway. I should have written this review in April...

I read the second book with a very critical mindset throughout. It was fun to be terribly critical for once! But I think ultimately I was trying to enjoy this series the wrong way. I'm used to sci-fi that takes itself more seriously. This series should be enjoyed as mindless fun instead!

Anyway, no way to fix that now. So, what did I dislike in particular?

Finally we are out of school. School was dumb. Having to master sword fighting. Like anybody does that on spaceships!

Actually they do. Swordfighting is the singular way of combat in this series, no matter if you are in a spaceship or underwater. I have to call out two examples to illustrate how it gets.

1) Spaceship vs spaceship in orbit around the Moon. Solution: put people in very very hard armor and shoot them at the other spaceship. The shots penetrate all the way to the command bridge and the heroes lay waste to the enemy. Why did we even need to put people in the armor if we can shoot it into the enemy bridge? Why not just shoot sacks of potatoes at that point? (The answer of course is the Rule of Cool.)

2) Dropping an army on Mars from orbit. Every man in one of those very very hard armors. Enemy aircraft ("ripWings") intercept them. No worry! Our hero has a sword!

Enemy ripWings followed us into the atmosphere, but here we’re more maneuverable, and we kill the big fighters with ease. I swoop in on one from behind with the Howlers hot on my tail, and slash it with my razor. I fly off as it spirals down through the clouds into the ocean below.

Even in Star Wars the Jedi fly spaceships to combat spaceships. They don't generally attack aircraft with lightsabers. Here, it's as if firearms never existed. Our hero holds a roomful of generals hostage with a sword. Nobody considers shooting him.

Months have passed since I read Golden Son, and I cannot stay angry about swords in space for this long. We get to visit a few planets/moons and they all have air and swordfighting. In a nod to science, gravity can be slightly different.

But my opinion of the plot structure has not improved with time. The hero was super at everything in school. But a few years later in the real world he gets beaten in space combat, he gets roughed up by a bunch of kids. No longer so invincible. He goes on anyway to challenge the best fighter in the universe to mortal combat. The duel is off to a bad start. Then we learn that he's been taking lessons in secret and is in fact the best fighter in the universe! Yay! This is not how books are supposed to go!

Normally the reader gets some hints in advance. It would be pretty easy to fix too. Like, in one scene an EMP disables all the tech. But surprise! Razors (swords) are not affected. Their control is "chemical". This would be fine by me if it had been mentioned earlier. But as it's just pulled out of thin air to save the hero in a seemingly hopeless situation it just feels like the author is messing with me. If razors are chemical, did the people with the EMP not know this? Why didn't they shoot something that disables razors too? (Like a grenade. They just wanted to kill everyone anyway.)

I found great satisfaction in the ending though! The hero walks into a clear ambush and everybody gets killed.

It's like a story thread that has been edited out from Borne. It's interesting to read it, but it's definitely to the benefit of Borne to not have included the story of the Strange Bird.

The overarching feeling of helplessness is even stronger here. I felt helpless about this theme. In Borne there were rays of sunshine poking through the clouds, but not so much this time. So I was not sure how to process it.

One way to fit these thoughts into my mind I found was to think of building artificial intelligences. I think they would be the closest in real life to the sentient biotech animals of Jeff VanderMeer. We are happy to train, re-train, glue together, and slice up our neural networks to fit the task of the day. That's all fine until they are objects and not people. But they already are more people-like than a toothbrush or a chair. It's a spectrum.

I was kindly provided a review copy of this book free of charge. Thanks!

I'm glad I got to read this book. It is very unique in many ways. Most prominently, it is written like a history book:

The order of battle was as follows: in Soliris there were two thousand men from the northern light cavalry, two thousand archers and five thousand pikemen, whereas in Highcliff, there were five thousand men from the heavy cavalry of the brigade of White Tigers led by Amos, Casper’s faithful second-in-command and five hundred rampart guards.

Lucas planned the ambush meticulously. His men were positioned exactly as he wished and they took Amos’ cavalry by surprise, whilst they were camped by the stream, resting before pushing on to Soliris. The Northern cavalry was decimated and only a handful escaped.

A lot of data about troops, equipment, fortifications, geography, past history, etc. But no drama at all. A terrible battle is described in one sentence.

This textbook style also carries over to the description of characters:

Regane the fencer was a red-headed, charismatic woman – beautiful, but fierce on the battlefield. Bertrand the Axe was a giant who was originally a woodcutter – he was not very intelligent, but he could single-handedly defeat a hundred men on a battlefield. Lucas was an intrepid archer and gifted tactician.

And even character development:

From the scared and innocent child that he once was, Hector had transformed into a truly charismatic leader, a leader of men and a future emperor that was both cherished and respected by his troops.

This book does not bow to "Show, Don't Tell". And why should it? Surely the goal is not for all authors to chase the single ideal until we have the perfect book at last. It was refreshing to read a story condensed in the way of a Wikipedia plot summary.

The question then is, how is the plot?

Both the plot and the setting are built of well-known tropes. The Orcs, Elves, and Dwarves are not introduced at all. The reader obviously knows them from childhood, so why waste words. There are 5,000 hyena-riding vampire mercenaries too, also not introduced. You know all about hyena riders, don't you?

I would not have minded the tropes if they were subverted at some point. I was always expecting the story to take an unexpected turn and explode into something crazy and fun. It would have worked so well with the dry, detached presentation. But the tropes were played straight all the way through. No twist.

That said, who knows what the second book brings! Somehow the unique writing style avoids giving a sure footing to the reader. It specifically avoids building a solid foundation, which gives a feeling of unpredictability.

The series is still going strong. Book 3 out of 4, so it can neither be an amazing plunge into a whole new world, nor a finish with amazing twists.

Are you baffled, reader?

Reader: “Insult me not, Mycroft.”

It has plenty of politics and philosophy of course. Some of the exposition is surprisingly boring. I mean relatively. The first two books and Mycroft's style of narration have prepared me for nothing less than a constant stream of poetry and revelation and unexpected perspectives. Then here we get a few transcripts of senate sessions or court proceedings that are none of that.

But soon enough the amazing writing returns. Just check out these examples:

I saw Ganymede too give me a last glance, cold and dismissive, and so infinitely less disdainful than my station deserved that I could not mistake it for anything but heartfelt thanks.

Now fear reared dragon-fierce inside me, pain, cold, numbness as my blood’s departure reduced muscle to meat.

The Great Scroll’s Addressee forms all His words with care, as if the rest of us think ourselves typists, armed with delete keys, while He alone remembers that we carve our speech in the unhealing stone called Time.

It's just a joy to read and savor so many sentences. The prose alone makes this 5 stars for me. Everything else is just sugar on the top.

The first two books had their share of interesting references to the process of authoring. Can we trust our narrator? Can we trust the person ("9A") who edited the text? The Will to Battle takes this even further. This is a diary of events after the first books, which make one book in the novel's world. These events include writing that book. My head is spinning.

The theological arc is also making good progress. War, and pretty much everything, is now viewed as a conversation between our universe's God and His Guest, Jehovah.

The cast of characters is so great that just getting a short update of what everyone is up to these days easily fills a book. It is insane to wish for more characters. But it is also a bit strange not to meet a single new person in a whole book. We also never learn much about the population. I suppose this gives the story an abstract quality, where each person is a walking-talking philosophy. If someone has no distinct philosophy, they appear to have no right to appear in this story.

The plot in The Will to Battle is all about preparing for a very unpredictable finale. I am very excited for book 4!

It's still great. Some parts are super fantastic.

The first two books had excellent structure: they weaved multiple stories together in great harmony, each chapter building up toward some overall goal. I think Oathbringer has less of a structure like that. There is of course a lot of plot and a lot of character development. But we also get a letter of a huge info-dump at some point, and there are long treks through relatively familiar territory that lack the intensity I got used to in the first two volumes.

And the trek through Shadesmar? I was dying to know more about Shadesmar! When we finally spend more than a few seconds there, it's all just a long hike with a bit of hitting some guys with sticks.

I think pacing issues and a weaker focus are acceptable in the 3rd volume of a 10-book epic. The plot is still moving fast and there are a lot of surprising reveals. If you compare the real world to the world of these books, the real world seems to have barely anything happening in it. Sure, human history has had some twists and turns, but nothing like what goes on in here. Sanderson's vision is far from being realized in full, but already true fans can easily have more information on the Cosmere than on reality. Lose yourself in coppermind.net/ if you like.

Being a third volume, Sanderson can rightly assume that everybody already loves all the characters. This means he can have some fun with them. I'm surprised how well the humor works. It's like he can just think "let's add a joke here to lighten the mood" and come up with a joke that actually works.

Anyway, when is the next book coming out? Oh right, I have to read [b:Elantris|68427|Elantris (Elantris, #1)|Brandon Sanderson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1475740953s/68427.jpg|2908871], [b:Warbreaker|1268479|Warbreaker (Warbreaker, #1)|Brandon Sanderson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1240256182s/1268479.jpg|1257385], [b:The Emperor's Soul|13578175|The Emperor's Soul|Brandon Sanderson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1343059311s/13578175.jpg|19161502], and [b:Edgedancer|34703445|Edgedancer (The Stormlight Archive #2.5)|Brandon Sanderson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1499706661s/34703445.jpg|54097500] in the meanwhile, right? Seriously this guy writes faster than I can read. (Not complaining.)

"What could be better than Mark Watney?" Those with little imagination may say "two Mark Watneys". Andy Weir says "a book where every character is Mark Watney".

It's all much more light-hearted than The Martian and the plot is more casually put together.
(E.g. why attack the smelter instead of the last harvester? Bob could just recall the two guards.) But a lot of tiny details about life on the Moon are well thought out. E.g.:

The train appeared on the horizon half an hour later. Owing to the small size of the moon, our horizon is only two and a half kilometers away, so I didn’t have long before it arrived at the station.

A good companion to [b:The Moon is a Harsh Mistress|16690|The Moon is a Harsh Mistress|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348768309s/16690.jpg|1048525]. Interesting to see what changed (wireless communications) and what stayed the same (laissez-faire).

Oh this was great. Yes, there is a giant bear. Half the rest of the cast is stranger than the bear. It's a wild story that would probably do okay on its own.

But the story is entirely eclipsed by the narration. Everything is told from the point of view of Rachel, a woman of color, an orphaned refugee. This point of view is very different from the standard. Her goal is not to uncover the plot. Her goal is not to solve the challenge ahead. She is so different from what I am used to from other fiction, and yet she is more human for it. So many unexpected decisions that I would probably make the same way. (If I ever faced the same, rather unlikely, circumstances.)

Oh and the writing. A lot of the book is about people saying different things than they think and yet understanding each other on some level. This is what is going on in real life all the time! And I see it so rarely in books. I think it is because it is super hard to pull off. It is a total success here though. Maybe because you get to know Rachel so well through the narration that reveals much of her thoughts.

All this is presented in fantastic prose. It is not just cleverly written to make for more interesting reading. Just look at these sentences and you will see how the elaborate phrasing packs on some extra layers of expression:

That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment. And no matter what happened next, I had crossed over into another place, and the question wasn’t who I should trust but who should trust me.

Wick kept too many secrets. It was getting too difficult—occupying the same space but traveling through separate universes of need, of want.

The worst thing was that I could not escape any of the passing seconds. Every moment came to me clear and distinct, and no one moment stood for anything but itself.

Hard to say how well these work without context... Anyway, just read the book and you will see. It's short.

The first book was a mixed bag, very weird pacing, but the world-building got me. The second book gave a new unexpected perspective on everything. Third book, another new unexpected perspective. Great demon-killing action all the while.

At the fourth book there was unexpectedly no new unexpected perspective. At this point I am interested in nothing but learning the answers the the existing burning questions. What's in the Core? What happened in the distant past? The big secrets. Instead we get weird politics, new characters I was absolutely not wishing for, and maybe 10 pages of progress in the main plot.

Bad omen, but it's not like I will stop reading a 5-volume series after the 4th volume. So how did the 5th and last volume do?

We got absolutely no big answers. What's in the Core? Magic! What happened in the past? A tunnel collapsed and Kaji kinda forgot about his crusade. What was the point of Rojer's character? Nothing.

The plot at least comes to an end. But even that I found unsatisfying. Arlen sacrafices himself to the Core and casts a spell that kills all demons. They could have done it as soon as he learned misting! Okay, maybe he needed to build up his control and willpower. But there was definitely no need for capturing Alagai Ka, finding the Spear of Ala, battling the Queen, etc. His ultimate spell made all the efforts of the rest of the cast pointless.

A new demon-fighting mechanic is added, but it is also less interesting than in previous books. They can now simply ward the air. In other words cast spells like a normal wizard.

Despite all my complaints, the book still has a unique atmosphere. Very uniquely all bodily fluids are featured at some point. Make a list of fluids you can think of with boxes that you can check as you read. See if you were able to list them all in advance!

Half the cast being pregnant is really unique too.

As a 5th book it's also inevitable that you have a close relationship with the characters by now. I enjoyed the bits of fun the author has with them. The large amount of history also means a lot of baggage. No two characters can meet at this point without each of them having done something good or (more likely) bad to a relative of the other in the past. Recalling these events is rote, but also necessary unless you kept notes while reading the earlier books.

I'd recommend reading maybe the first three books and no longer!