Reviews and Comments

Huh! Kind of not much actually here, is there. I know it's just one trade, but this is really just "look how different we're doing the origin story" with nothing else to chew on. The digs at LLMs are appreciated ideologically but kind of ham-fisted in practice.

What should I laud first? Taylor Robin's excellent use of the visual medium to convey emotion, meaning, and momentum? The stridently proletarian perspective in a genre and setting that are both dominated by a fascination with aristocracy? A truly world-class homoerotic vampire/neck moment in a book that isn't even really about that? It's all so excellent I don't even know where to start. This is an impressive work by any measure, and as a first full graphic novel the level of craft on display here in combination with the raw engagement of the story is downright incredible.

I'll admit: I found this one a bit less the-juice-y than Oathbringer! To be sure it absolutely got its hooks into me and was fun the whole way through, but the real emotional intensity was extremely concentrated in the dense series of climaxes in the last act. I'm not complaining about those—they got me crying more than once!—but the way the whole thing builds to that one moment feels more like a magic trick of the sort Wit muses on in the epilogue than a deeply felt narrative.

I guess I'm just sad because this feels a bit more like Classic Sanderson, fun and good at the structure of the story but lacking a bit in the texture. But I can't complain too much when I'm already checking the library to see how long it'll be before I can borrow Wind and Truth.

Very brief, but good! You can definitely see the sensitivity reader seams here but that's not necessarily a bad thing especially for something with such a wide audience. It's fun to see that dovetail with Sanderson's trademark mechanical-mindedness, too.

This series is as ever a balm to my soul. This volume is a little bit more of a collection of disjoint stories, but now that the world's been established it's a lovely way of just immersing oneself in it. And that is to a large degree the appeal here: the way in which the world is so detailed and the stories such an admixture of the quotidien and the otherworldly makes it feel like a space to exist in and allow to sweep over oneself. Reading it is meditative in a similar sense to revisiting an old favorite, but it has that effect from the first read.

Much like 2666, it's hard for me to tell how I feel about this in the moment, but I strongly suspect it'll haunt my memories for a long time to come. In fact, the inspiration for reading it in the first place was that 2666 kept bouncing around in there. While this doesn't have the same eerie quality, the depth that its 360-degree portrait of the main characters goes into is incredibly impressive. I have no idea how to summarize who Arturo Bolano or Ulises Lima are in words, but I feel that they now inhabit my heart.

It's incredible that people read this as a satire of (quoting the Goodreads blurb here) "Soviet pseudo-science" when it's so clearly applicable to research-focused academia in any context, or honestly any job involving working with and around the idiosyncrasies of your colleagues. Granted Vybegallo can be read pretty clearly as a Lysenko analog, but I think the more interesting parts of the book are the ones where its affection for the process of scientific labor outshines its scorn for the foibles. The final section on Nevstruev is particularly poignant as well as being really strong science fiction writing, which obviously the authors are capable of but still takes one by surprise that far towards the end of what is up until that point a largely humorous book.

"It looks like we're all about food." Isn't that just the dream?

Nice to get some backstory and lore, but perhaps not as toothsome as some other volumes.