Reviews and Comments

Will

whami@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 4 months ago

A numbers geek reading SFF to maintain some hope in this world.

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Some Desperate Glory (Paperback, en-Latn-GB language, 2023, Orbit) 4 stars

All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of …

Good, but not great

4 stars

The first half of this book reads like a very predictable standard space opera, then it takes a turn for the wild. There are a lot of great ideas here, and my only criticism is that the pacing in the second half was awkward. Tesh rushed through some segments that could have used more detail, yet lingered on other parts way too long.

The House of Saints (2023, Black Library, The) 5 stars

The Stunning conclusion to the Venus Ascendant series, from the world of The Quantum Magician. …

A Fantastic Conclusion

5 stars

This book is filled with sorrow and loss, but also hope. The two books of this series are beautiful. The detailed worldbuilding meshes well with the sibling series, but is separate enough to be fresh and new. Künsken lovingly handles issues of gender identity, poverty, and the crimes people commit for survival, sometimes with a gentle caress and sometimes with a fist to the face. He explores how governments react to those self-preserving crimes, and also how the governed may deal with their intuitions. There is a lot of hard SF here too. Near-future science on a vivid and believable Venus drive the story.

reviewed The House of Styx by Derek Künsken

The House of Styx (2021, Solaris) 5 stars

The first in a ground breaking new science fiction series from the best-selling author of …

Unexpected and Wonderful

5 stars

I tend not to like prequels, so even though I enjoyed Künsken's Quantum Evolution series, I put off reading this for too long. As I mentioned in a previous comment, I went into this confident that I knew the book I would be getting, but ended up being completely wrong. The book explored several concepts I wasn't expecting from this writer, most notably a gender identity story, and did it so deftly that it appeared effortless. The pacing of the book was deliberate and slow, but Künsken painted such a wonderful picture of the society and the people in it that it was nice to linger for a while. There are many pages devoted to the the physics of Venus, both in the clouds and on the surface, and I imagine that some readers may get impatient, but I found them creative and interesting. This is one of my two …

started reading The House of Styx by Derek Künsken

The House of Styx (2021, Solaris) 5 stars

The first in a ground breaking new science fiction series from the best-selling author of …

I'm a little under halfway and have encountered a couple things I wasn't expecting. First, it is radically different from its sibling series, The Quantum Evolution. Second, there is a gender identity story here and it is being told extremely well up to this point. Any time I think I understand Derek Künsken he shows me how wrong I am.

System Collapse (Hardcover, 2023, Tordotcom) 4 stars

Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.

Following the events in …

I may be reaching my limit with this series

3 stars

This will probably be the unpopular minority opinion, but here goes...

This book was still enjoyable, but the first half was extremely slow. It picked up once we got into the action, but it was somewhat more subtle this time around. There is nothing wrong with the book, but it feels like Wells thinks she needs to do more to evolve this character, but doesn't really know what, so we just get tiny bits.

Starter Villain (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine.

Sure, there …

Go into it with no expectation except fun

4 stars

Like most Scalzi books this is a great story and a lot of fun. If you want some escapism then you've come to the right place. If you're looking for something deeper, this will not be satisfying at all.