Review of 'A Thousand Li: The First War' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
This was a really frustrating read. Wu Ying spent the entire novel repeatedly going on about how he shouldn't do X, Y, or Z for many, many reasons, then 3 seconds later going ahead and doing X, Y, and Z for the flimsiest of reasons.
Despite being older in this book, he acts like he's actually gotten younger, or somehow lost a few dozen IQ points. This adversely affected his relationships with those around him, not that they were well fleshed out to begin with. The war portion came across as kinda boring, and there was a lack of motivation for a lot of the actions taken by the secondary characters - or by the main cast for that matter.
All in all this was pretty disappointing, I'll give the next book a chance, I like the series and the concept, so hopefully the next book is better.
I liked the book. There is a lot going for it and worth a read. It does have a number of flaws however. I looked past them to enjoy the book, but they did ultimately diminish my enjoyment of the novel.
On the plus side, the use of the nanoverses and gods was something new that I haven't come across before. Finding something new is pretty rare these days! There is a huge amount of potential here. There was a good amount of action, and generally the pacing was pretty tight. The book was also relatively free of grammatical and spelling mistakes (something you can't take for granted anymore!).
The downsides. I thought our protagonist, Ryan, lacked agency. He constantly just "rolled with it", getting dragged along by whichever of his companions he was with at the time. This made sense to some extent, given context in the novel, but …
I liked the book. There is a lot going for it and worth a read. It does have a number of flaws however. I looked past them to enjoy the book, but they did ultimately diminish my enjoyment of the novel.
On the plus side, the use of the nanoverses and gods was something new that I haven't come across before. Finding something new is pretty rare these days! There is a huge amount of potential here. There was a good amount of action, and generally the pacing was pretty tight. The book was also relatively free of grammatical and spelling mistakes (something you can't take for granted anymore!).
The downsides. I thought our protagonist, Ryan, lacked agency. He constantly just "rolled with it", getting dragged along by whichever of his companions he was with at the time. This made sense to some extent, given context in the novel, but there wasn't a lot of growth or change, which from a reader's perspective got really old, really fast.
One of the things that bothered me was the "man in the suit" and how it was handled. Ryan's theoretically been traumatised by the continual observation by this man only he can see, to the point of having seen multiple therapists, ruining relationships, etc, but shortly into the book when the man goes away, Ryan is now totally fine, no lingering trauma, or glances to the corners of a room. Thirty years of psychological abuse by some sort of cosmic bureaucrat, whose role or point in the story is never really clarified - if they can be invisible to everyone else, why not observed their subjects invisibly as well???, doesn't disappear overnight.
Lukas' review mentioned some of the illogical decisions made by the main cast, which I won't repeat here.
The last thing I'll mention is about the antagonists. They were rather over-the-top, and almost cartoonishly evil.
The big-bad, Enki, was revealed to be straight-up insane, but the that doesn't give him a complete pass on being stupidly evil. The motivation of Enki's 'allies' was never really all that clear - one had something they were looking for, but it seemed like a poor reason to join forces with someone who was clearly not in their right mind. It also wasn't clear why none of the other gods had any knowledge of the whole, if the world doesn't end, the sun blows up thing. Yes, Crystal is much older than any of the other human gods, but theoretically other Eschatons have existed, and other stars with their own gods exist, some of which have gone supernova. Given how the gods already ignore the rules of physics to fly around the universe and teleport, could they not talk to the gods from other planets? Talk to the curators, who have theoretically seen this all before? I'm sure some of this will be addressed in future books, but it would have been nice to have at least mentioned some of these points in this work, even if the characters couldn't fully explore this in detail. Lastly, the American Admiral who is being set up to be a major antagonist in future books is almost offensive in how much over the top religious zealotry is foisted upon him. At least that's what I would have though if the world hadn't just watched 4 years of that happening in the USA. It was still a bit much, and could have been tempered a little, which I think would make for a more interesting, complex villain instead of a caricature.
Overall it was an enjoyable read, and I look forward to reading other works by this author in the future.
