Reviews and Comments

I'm a little shy of the halfway point of this book and I'm still not really sure what I'm reading. That's not a bad thing; I'm enjoying it very much. But if someone were to ask what it's about I would have to tell them that I have no idea.

Thanks to @remotevoices@mastodon.xyz for reminding me this book existed. I'd forgotten.

I love the world Malka Older created and the two main characters are wonderful. But I would have liked the story to be longer. The resolution felt very rushed.

Mostly a rom-com, but slides into science fiction a little, with just a pinch of social activism. The less you know going into it, the better.

This is one of my favorite books from 2022. It investigates how difficult communications will be when the two parties have almost no common reference. It takes a swipe (perhaps not intentionally) at the books and movies where alien communication moves rapidly from no commonality to complete sentences conveying complex abstract topics. Along with language, the book also explores consciousness and what makes a person a person.

The environmental message never feels heavy handed, and while it often paints a disturbing picture, it also offers a hopeful outlook.

As I neared the end I worried that it would take a sloppy shortcut to wrap up so much, but the ending was quite satisfying, although perhaps not in the ways I was expecting.

This is incredibly imaginative, but sometime maybe too smart for its own good. There are parts that don't make a lot of sense and are occasionally a slog to get through, but they all weave together by the end. There is a lot of insightful commentary on the current state of social media, and this was published before Musk took over Twitter. This is likely to be one of the 6 novels I nominate for the 2023 Hugo (assuming nominations ever open).

As always, Annalee Newitz is astoundingly smart. She fills this book with many interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the story she writes around the ideas in this book is a little weak. The most notable example is in the first section where two factions have little reason to trust each other, yet they do so in only a couple pages.

Terraformers is still worth reading for the concepts, but Newitz's previous two works of fiction are easily superior.

This book comes off a lot differently than when I first read it in 2018; a lot has changed in the world. I remember the ending seemed a lot more satisfying last time, but that could just be from my knowledge of what's in the next two books. I originally gave this 5 starts, but if I rated it now, it would probably only get 4. I wonder about the extent to which I have Narrative Disorder. Obviously not to the extent of Mishima, but I frequently make connections and draw conclusions that no one around me does. And there are the times I get it spectacularly wrong, although again, not to the extent of Mishima. I enjoyed the reread, but I felt something was missing.

There's no real way to state why I didn't like this book as much as its predecessors without spoiling nearly the entire thing. Suffice to say, the tone of this book is inconsistent with the rest of the series.

This has been a lot of expository dumping so far, but it's so well done that I'm not feeling resentful at being told rather than shown.

There is nothing wrong with this book, but there is nothing especially interesting or memorable about it either. It feels like it was written as a side project, which it was. It does get extra consideration since, like all Sanderson fantasy, it has a well thought out magic system instead of one that evolves to fit whatever corner the author writes themself into.

@mouse Do you have advice for how I can fix the title of this book? It shows up correctly in the actual listing of the book, but when it appears in a list of search results it shows as "TREES of the Emerald Sea" instead of "TRESS of the Emerald Sea". Thanks.

I'd seen a fair amount of press on this, but I moved it up higher in my TBR pile when Max recommended it.