Reviews and Comments

I really enjoyed reading Steel Guardian by Cameron Coral. I think I got it on some sort of sale, based on reading the premise of “janitor robot must protect human baby while wandering though the wasteland of the AI Uprising Apocalypse”. Premise

That quick statement is basically the entire premise and plot of the book. Block is a service bot who once served as the janitor for a hotel in Chicago. The uprising of the soldier bots left them without their human guests to serve and so they are wandering in search of a new hotel to clean. A chance encounter while searching for a power source leaves block in charge of a human infant and searching for a worthy person to give the baby to. Along the way, Block encounters other robots and people on the journey who help Block figure out out to actually care for the child. This includes Nova, a human captured by robots and searching for her way to escape. What I Liked

I really liked the characterization of Block. Block is a flawed character with a very specific view of the world and that view flavors every interaction they have with others throughout the entire book.

The world building is also done very well, painting a dystopian war setting where things are still very touchy between the human side and the machine side which gives a good background to Block needing to lay low to get the child to someone before either human soldiers or the robot soldiers can find them and harm either. What I Didn’t Care For

There were two scenes I didn’t care for in the book. One is the scene in the robot market where Nova first enters the scene. She’s been captured as an enemy combatant and is placed on sale to the other robots, which that whole slave market scene and the implications and discussions of what robots might do with their own human were a little much, but I suppose had their part in why the child must be kept away from the bots.

The other is the final climactic scene which just ends. There’s no real resolution or denouement, just an end. There are more books to the series, maybe this really was the cleanest place to break the series, but it just felt sudden and jarring to me. And it’s not really a cliffhanger; this story’s main conflict is resolved in the scene just before. It’s just a sudden end. Overall

Like I said, overall I really liked this one and did purchase the other books in the series and plan to read them all. The banter between Nova and Block, the relationships between Nova and Block and the child, the other characters who enter and exit the story, the lingering mystery of how the kid came to be in the incubator bot in the firefight in the first place. It was all really fun to read and I enjoyed it a lot.

This was not my first time reading Three Parts Dead. In fact, I pre-ordered it when it first came out and read it then. Max Gladstone just released the second book of a sequel series to the original Craft Sequence books and in getting ready to read the Craft Wars books, I decided to go back and read the original Craft Sequence. Let me begin by saying that my original pre-order was based on the fact that when I originally heard about Three Parts Dead, I immediately went to pre-order it because the premise sounded like it was written precisely for me. Like specifically for me. It was exactly the intersection of interests. Premise

That premise is that the Craft Sequence books take place in a world where the law is magic. This book came out while I was just starting my second year of law school. I am both a giant law nerd AND a giant fantasy nerd. So that sentence was enough to snag me. Especially as Gladstone wrote an article with Tor before the book came out that it was inspired by his wife being in law school and the pseudo-Latin that lawyers are subjected to in school sounding like the incantations you’d expect to hear in a magical school book. Which is true. Res Judicata and post hoc ergo propter hoc and Res Loquitur all sound like things a wizard would shout to make things happen. There are days working as a lawyer where I am sad I can’t just shout legal latin at people and make things happen.

Anyway, the plot of Three Parts Dead centers around Tara, a graduate of the Hidden Schools, see: magical law school. The Hidden Schools teach you how to be a magical contracts lawyer slash necromancer. Again, I told you that as a law student slash fantasy geek I thought this sounded awesome. Tara is offered a job, but the permanency of that position relies on her impressing the bosses. That job just happens to be the resurrection of a dead god using contract magic that looks like bankruptcy law tracking the movement of divine energy like forensic accounting. But like, exciting and necromancy. I might be a giant nerd, but trust me.

Abelard is another major character in the book, being a priest of the dead fire god of Alt Coulumb. He’s tasked with showing Tara around and acts sort of like the Watson character for when magic needs explained to the audience.

Cat is a servant of Justice, formerly the goddess Seril before her death in the God Wars and reconstruction into a new being in a situation not entirely unlike the current one. She’s trying to investigate the murder of a judge who was supposed to hear the case and deal with the implications of all that comes out of the case. What I Liked

Okay, so this book released right at the beginning of my second year of law school. Like I said, the premise of magical lawyers was right up my alley. I bought this knowing that the likelihood I connected with it was near 100%. And I did connect with it. Gladstone, now probably better known for being a co-author of This is How You Lose the Time War (see: another instant pre-order for me from premise), gets a voice to the characters and has a skill for the world-building that just makes the whole thing make sense like why wouldn’t law be magic?

Early in my career, and still today honestly, Tara being this newbie thrown out into the world and having to impress everyone by doing everything herself just resonates. She’s got flaws in being too sure of what she’s doing and it does lead her into trouble just as often as into a correct answer. She’s a great character to center this book around. What Didn’t Work for Me

This thing was an ambitious debut for Gladstone and in juggling the plots, there was one that wasn’t hit out of the park for me on this first book. Cat has a plot around having something missing that leads her into a vampire addiction, but Cat’s deal never really gets too fleshed out beyond that and beyond being a parallel to the current situation if it goes wrong. That makes Justice’s role in the finale with the Gargoyle fight and with De Novo in the Temple of Justice feel a little ex machina to use some pseudo-Latin. Cat just felt a little under-developed compared to Tara and Abelard. Overall

Overall, this is honestly one of my favorite book series. And this was the book that got me hooked on it and paying attention to what else Gladstone wrote.

Sure Cat could use some additional fleshing out, but that didn’t keep me from flipping pages into the night to see what came next even on my re-read.

So, this is a great book and you should definitely check it out.

Earlier today I finished reading Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey. Nemesis Games is book five of the Expanse series. It is a space opera set in our solar system a couple hundred years in the future. The Expanse focuses on the adventures of the crew of the Rocinante as they deal with events that change the balance of power between Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets. The fifth entry mixes up the formula a bit by splitting the party and having them each handle their own affairs dealing with their pasts and what led them together against a backdrop of events that put the past firmly and irretrievably in the past.

Going forward, I will be discussing the events of the book in discussing why I liked it, so be forewarned that there will be spoilers.

Moments I Particularly Enjoyed
Honestly, the first thing that came to mind in thinking about memorable pieces to this story was the entire arc for Naomi Nagata. Naomi has spent the series as the Rocinante's chief engineer with a mysterious past before joining up with the crew. Nemesis Games brings that past right to the forefront, having the hardline Outer Planets separatist father of Naomi's son pull her back into the struggle between the Belt and the Inner Planets. She struggles with the ways in which she has helped Marco to harm people in the past and the ways he continues to use what she did to hurt people in the present. She struggles with the act her son makes dropping meteorites on Earth causing immense ecological damage. Naomi has to use her own wits to escape from becoming trapped by her past, culminating in a leap of faith in herself through the vacuum of space to ensure she protects the crew of the Rocinante from being pulled into a trap by Marco Inarros. Naomi's story is a tense one, waiting to see when the next shoe will drop.

Elsewhere, the stories following Pilot Alex and Engineer Amos give us our first real looks in the series at life on Mars and Earth respectively. Alex travels to check in on family and his ex-wife which eventually leads to him meeting back up with gunnery sergeant Bobbie Draper and finding himself dragged into a mystery she's been looking into involving missing military supplies. Amos travels to Baltimore because an old friend has died and he wants to see what has happened.

Amos's trip has him on Earth when the rocks fall. He must find a way off the planet, travelling across a post-apocalyptic DC metro area on a search for a ride to Luna.

As the book comes to its climax, the stories begin to have moments which cross from one story to the next and bring the crew back together. Honestly, each crew member really does get an interesting story showing off their own way to handle the adversities thrown their way.

Things I Didn't Like
As much as each story was interesting and I did very much enjoy them, one thing I've liked about The Expanse is the ensemble cast. These characters are a found family, each playing off the others, the relationships adding up to more than the sum of their parts. Those relationships were missing here as each character wished they were with the others but the number of chapters where the characters were on the same planet let alone in the same room could be nearly counted on one hand.

But honestly, that was a minor thing. Most of the time so much was going on in each of the stories that there wasn't enough time to worry about when the team would be back together.

Final Thoughts
Overall, this was one I really enjoyed. Of course, I'd enjoyed the other Expanse books, so I went in essentially knowing I would. If you're someone who enjoys science fiction that's mostly grounded in real science, even if there are a few liberties taken. This is a series you'll enjoy. I've heard the political drama between the factions referred to as "Game of Thrones in Space" and I suppose that's not a terrible way to think of the series. So much goes on in these books and so much of the situation changes from book to book.

And honestly, Nemesis Games definitely delivers on the promise of throwing a wrench into things. Rocks falling and causing a near-extinction event is the king of all wrenches, and that's before considering that alien biological weapons go missing. While the major threads are pretty neatly tied up, there are definitely quite a few left to drag you straight into the next book. I'm looking forward to continuing with this series.