User Profile

I am a sucker for a good starting sentence or paragraph (how else would I ever have read the whole of Moby Dick?), so this is right up my alley.

Still labouring with my feelings about Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture novels, and this one (which works well; hat tip to Soh Kam Yung’s review) makes me suspect the issue is emotional dissociation from the characters and how that works out for the novel in question. Anyway, good read.

KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song. It’s meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you’re done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face.

Not much to add to that, really.

There isn’t much I can add to loppear@bookwyrm.social’s review; once again, Chambers is simply wonderful. Here, she is running with the wholesome if slightly insipid promise for the future Solarpunk holds to explore human condition and (not entirely incidentally, I suspect) thumb a very long nose to the whole “machine uprising” crowd. I don’t know how someone can be so relentlessly, melancholically upbeat, but I do know I had to finish this before work, and that I had a little happy cry when I did.

Calling a serious, revisionist study of a key event in the Pacific war a page-turner may sound odd, but in this case, it is warranted. Its authors manage the singular feat of combining a sober overall assessment of the Battle of Midway, a keen eye for the doctrinal aspects of military operations, a tremendous amount of factual groundwork breaking from received narratives (and catching up with Japanese military historiography) with a breathless style of narration worthy of an action thriller.

A multigenerational story of mankind having to become symbiotic with life forms beyond its understanding to survive, this is marred by pedestrian prose, a narrative structure that leaves no room for characters to feel for, and a take on an alien, vegetable life form that has all the charm of a chemistry lesson. Read Children of Time if you like the idea done well.

Chambers’ Wayfarers cycle, of which this ostensibly is the last instalment, is the rare kind of SF that works its magic though the heart more than through the brain. The story of five aliens marooned, for a little while, on what is, essentially, an intergalactic road stop, will make you cry over a smile, rekindle your belief in humanity (even if nary a human plays a part) and, at times, laugh out loud (apparently, the matter of cheese is the most befuddling issue aliens would have with humankind). Or at least it made me do so.

In her closing notes, Drayden speaks of what an uphill battle finishing this novel was; sadly, that shows. While her universe of human colonies living parasitically inside vast spacefaring beasts is as wildly and immersingly imaginative as ever, this reprise of Escaping Exodus suffers from halting character arcs, choppy pacing and a deus ex machina resolution that lets whole plot threads dangling.

… to ensure that Hugo was deserved after all.

Clark’s debut is promising: an unconventional settling, a compelling narrative, and the guts to spell out what colonialism does to people – both the ruled and the rulers. It also veers distressingly close to “chosen” fantasy tropes, and its haphazard character arcs and perfunctory resolution make it unable to fulfil that promise. Maybe the next volume of the series will.

Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries is the rare gem: the series that gives on giving. This sixth instalment has all the qualities of its predecessors: it’s short, on point, and keeps us up to date with the evolution of her cyborg protagonist’s unplanned feature upgrade (a personality) with all its quirks (people), all in the guise of an entertaining SF whodunnit.