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You ever intentionally shy away from a popular piece of media just to be contrarian for its own sake but then you eventually come back around to it and realized, no, actually it was as good as everyone was saying? That's what I'm feeling right now.

Simply put this was a masterclass in suspense. There were four distinct scenes I'm still thinking about that had me stressing the fuck out as I was reading them, and I'm lucky if I can get one such scene out of most horror books. The entire concept of "you become irrevocably suicidal if you look at this specific thing" was utilized to its fullest extent in a myriad of ways and never came off as a cheap gimmick. This was the epitome of "less is more."

We also got both ends of the Creature Feature/Humans are the Real Monsters spectrum. Like yes, this setting is dystopian as hell and characters were awful to each other, but there were also very much actual monsters in the mix as well. Sometimes in the same scenes!

No further notes, this book slapped.

It'd be the easiest thing in the world to just call this "MacGuyver but in space" (and you'd be mostly right to do so!), but that leaves out the sheer, improbable luck this protagonist experiences that really tested my suspension of disbelief.

I don't want to use the term "Mary Sue" too flippantly, but our main character, Fergus Ferguson (yes, that's his real name and yes, other characters have the same knee-jerk reaction I did upon hearing it), is a little too neat of a package for me. Even now having finished the book I struggle to think of a major character flaw beyond, "survivor's guilt, sorta kinda?" He's clearly meant to be likeable, but when you're so much of a nice guy out of the gate and you're pretty much the same at the end of the story, why am I as a reader compelled to follow you?

I'll mostly remember this book for the fact that damn near every other scene ended with Fergus either going to sleep or getting his ass kicked and blacking out - which happened frequently enough to notice before the midpoint of the book - and the fact that he eavesdropped on about six or seven different plot-relevant conversations. There's a lot of right place/right time going on here, and it never really felt like he was at risk of a meaningful failure or setback. The stakes felt too low for me.

That said, the worldbuilding was done well, and I appreciated the attention to detail vis-a-vis space station life and zero-gravity interactions. The station politics and factions were almost more interesting to me than the outsider who came and screwed up everyone's backroom machinations. And there's plenty of dramatic action and momentum pulling you from scene to scene. So it wasn't all bad, but I was looking for something a little more engaging than this.

Well it's a day that ends in 'Y', which means it's a beautiful day to despise the Russian government with every fiber of my being!

This is a powerful argument for asking Western governments to stop treating powerful heads of state as one-off, case-by-case studies; the Francos and Mugabes of the 20th century no longer provide the model of authoritarianism. Seemingly diverse countries with little in common beyond a desire to stay in power in the face of Western pressure (Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe to name a few) are all interconnected now in an effort to provide an air of legitimacy to each other. The overwhelming message they convey to their populaces is, "yes we're bad, but it could be worse, so don't fight to change things."

Rather than acting as a bridge to bring these oppressive regimes into the Western fold, post-Cold War economic overtures have instead acted as a rope that can be pulled against democracies for leverage (Germany being so dependent upon Russian gas pipelines and high-tech industries relying on Chinese rare earth suppliers come to mind). And on a smaller scale, cities like Vancouver and London allow powerful foreign nationals from hostile countries to park wealth in the form of real estate without repercussion, and at detriment to their own citizens.

I appreciate that the book tries to end on a more positive note, laying out a potential blueprint for how liberal democracies can combat deliberate misinformation, cyberwarfare aimed at infrastructure that we're pretending isn't already happening, and cultural defeatism in general, but it felt a touch too ambitious to me. Or maybe I'm already bought in to the idea that our enemies have too much of a head-start in the information age.

Trying to consolidate and categorize the entirety of human fiction into a handful of neatly-defined archetypes has been attempted multiple times, but that doesn't mean it's an easy task. Rudyard Kipling thought there were sixty-nine. Carlos Gozzi thought there were thirty-six. Aristotle argued there were only two. Why does this book land on twenty? Well, why not?

The "Master Plots" as they're laid out are logical and defended in a fair manner with lots of examples, both from literature and screenplays and movies. I was well past the halfway point when I noticed that all of the examples being given seemed oddly dated and nothing past the 80's was being referenced, and it was only then that I clocked that this was published in 1993. I think that goes a long way into explaining why a lot of the suggestions and guidelines provided here felt strangely conservative to me.

Nothing terribly groundbreaking here, but I enjoy occasionally reading something meta-level about fiction, and I'm sure I'm gonna start fitting these "Master Plots" to whatever books I read next, seeing how neatly they line up with the tried and true approaches.

I haven't decided if waiting to read this book until I experienced a real life cold snap in the dead of winter was a brilliant move or a bad idea, but I'll be damned that extra bit of immersion didn't heighten my anxiety!

There's always going to be an appeal to doomed narratives where you already know the outcome, but the more bleak and sad that ending is, the more the morbid part of your mind wants to know how things got to that point. The Terror certainly doesn't disappoint here, going into superb (at times maybe too much?) detail outlining the ultimately futile attempts of this expedition's crew to survive in one of the harshest environments on earth. I'm talking descriptions of sailors unable to blink because their eyelids literally froze open, absent-mindedly touching cold metal with an ungloved hand and losing your skin as you pull away, the stench of wearing four layers of clothes you haven't washed in literal months, and one of the most graphic scenes of pre-industrial surgery I've read probably ever.

This is a cold book that was wonderfully atmospheric and was one of those, "the setting itself is a character" stories. To say nothing of the huge cast of sailors who are trying to place faith in their leaders to get them out of this mess until rule of law begins to break down and whispers of mutiny grow too loud. There are a ton of names to remember, but with a book this long and with as much time as you spend with them, it isn't too bad keeping track of them.

Also there's a monster. The monster was very good. Just an unstoppable, evil, and smart antagonist that caused multiple moments that had me saying, "oh Jesus Christ..." out loud. Never have I seen such a sinister force meting out punishment for the cardinal sin of checks notes "being British."

However the part that will always give me pause when recommending this to people in the future will be the ending, which kind of has a bit of a tone shift from being absolutely soul-crushingly bleak to somewhat kinda optimistic? I almost wish things had committed to being the worst possible outcome right to the very end because I was expecting it. There's also kind of a strange mysticism/variant of the "Magical Minority helps the white man" trope that I could've done without.

If nothing else, I feel like for pretty much the rest of my life whenever I experience something really cold I'm gonna be muttering to myself, "omg, this just like The Terror..."