User Profile

There are a lot of ideas in this novel that do bear thinking about but the narrative, heavily reliant on a series of vignettes from the future, feels disjointed to the point that it keeps stumbling over itself. I do like the eventual optimism of the novel, but did find it a bit too reliant on hand-waving and buzzwords for me to really buy into it.

As a novel, The Ministry for the Future felt a lot like an exercise in wasted potential.

This has proved to be a very satisfying conclusion to an incredibly solid trilogy, and one that manages to combine the fatalism of Norse mythology with a collection of genuinely sympathetic characters.

I can't wait to see what Thilde Kold Holdt does next.

Normally I am a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky, but this novel proved to be surprisingly hard going.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in here, and the ending works really well. But it did take long time to get there.

As an exploration of what it means to be a person, from the point of view of a 7ft bioengineered dog, this novel is absolutely brilliant. The main character, Rex, is a good dog, and in this novel Adrian Tchaikovsky really does manage to effectively portray this dogs-eye view of the world.

Dogs of War is a very readable novel and one with much to say about sentience, slavery, artificial intelligence, and what happens when all these threads come together.

It really is superb.

A fun, if rather light, entry in the Laundry series.

This third entry in Tepper's Arbai sort-of-trilogy is the weakest of the three, but this is possibly a reflection of the incredibly high bar she set for herself with Grass.

Sideshow returns to may of the themes of the previous two books, but it all feels a bit more didactic, with less engaging characters and a weaker, more plodding, story.

If you have read Grass and Raising the Stones, then Sideshow wraps things up reasonably well. Otherwise... Tepper has written better books than this.

The premise of this novel is comically brilliant and the early chapters have several laugh-out-loud moments.

It all slows down a bit once the plot gets going, but The Kaiju Preservation Society remains a fun romp throughout.

While there are plenty of moments of comic brilliance, Most Harmless does have a bit of a disjointed feel overall.

I did feel, with Life, the Universe and Everything, that the series was starting to lose it's way somewhat. With this book, though, Adams gets solidly back on track.

It's very different to what has gone before, and this is very much to the book's advantage. Arthur is more of a character this time around and there's visible plot.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is still very much a Hitchhiker's book, but it also demonstrates the value in a series taking the occasional left turn.

I do have a strong sense of the series starting to lose its way with this novel. It certainly has its moments, but really doesn't come close to the standard set by the first two books.

This is a lot funnier than I remembered and, if anything, even better that The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

It feels that Adams really hit his stride with this book and the absurdities that make his writing such a joy to read feel a lot more pointed and, consequently, a great deal more effective.

Given the age of this story, it's surprising just how relevant E.M. Forster's dystopia remains.

42 years later and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is still as absurdly funny, insanely perceptive and shockingly relevant as ever.

I still love the babel fish!