Reviews and Comments

It’s…. well. It’s mostly fun!

I have a fondness for self-indulgent stories about logistics competence, and for ‘vaguely historical and/or fantasy setting but you are the guy who builds the traps in the megadungeon’ type light novel silliness. You get fun worldbuilding and usually a funny & refreshingly blunt narrative voice. This has these things, which is why I listened to it after reading half of it a couple of years ago. And it executes on those things well! Lots of stuff about little details of mechanics in this world, which as it’s a lightly reskinned roman empire world are fairly indistinguishable from mechanics in our world (I say this with next to no knowledge of roman weaponry and production, or indeed physics. I managed not to think about history for basically this whole book, which is a feat for me; classics scholars may hate it.)

The stuff on empire and loyalty is interesting, though I didn’t find it very consistent or, to be honest, very persuasive. But it was still interesting!

Alright, spoilers ahead, n also more negative stuff. . . . . . . . . . . . . The ending is, like, fine. I like a good tragedy - this didn’t Quite work as a good tragedy for me. I would have liked him to have to grapple with the aftermath a little more, personally, instead of being a Martyr of Stubbornness or whatever. Maybe the author is speaking to an interest/fear/desire that I do not have.

In audiobook form it was particularly obvious all the times the author reused turns of phrase, which was: enough times & clunkily enough for me to think ‘huh, that was sloppy’. This is pretty minor though. The main thing is: the misogyny!

You can make your character a salt-of-the-earth Complicated misogynist who, no, look, there’s loads of women he respects, and who the narrative respects cos they’re so skilled in engineering or chess! You can do that, and have him literally have a woman sleep with him as payment for something (which he doesn’t do) and immediately betray her, resulting in her gruesome death, and have that misogyny never punished by the narrative. You can’t do all that and frame it as ‘a necessary evil, makes you think, huh?’ or ‘ah, he’s cranky but he has a good heart, time to move on with our perspective on this character not particularly changed’ or ‘ohh this guy, stuck in his ways, but a charming idiot’ and have me still fully enjoy this book. It really feels like a lot of classic sci fi and fantasy I bounced off growing up over and over again because it was so clearly written by straight men who never really thought about what women, or men with different experiences, might find uncomfortable in a story. A story that makes its readers uncomfortable on purpose can obviously be fantastic - but where this book does that I feel like it’s going for shock value and not following it up with actual thought, ‘omg her scalp!!’, and in most of the misogynistic bits it doesn’t seem like the author intends for the reader to be uncomfortable at all, to any extent beyond ‘haha, main character, what a weird but relatable guy’. If you’re going to have your antihero-ish main character have a fun little chat with his gentlemanly paragon friend where he makes a direct rape joke, and you’re deploying it in the same way you deploy all your other jokes - like a fun characterful bit of patter to ease your reader through some exposition - then you’ve gone wrong somewhere. It’s not deconstructed sexism just because he gets a tragic death with his daughter beating at the door, or because he’s a Complicated Guy who Values Women Sometimes (in-narrative, he values women when he is in love with them, is their father, or they are in love with him), or because you talk sympathetically about how women have it particularly hard in this world. There isn’t like… a little card that you can get that lets you joke about raping women and have it succeed as a light comfortable joke.

Anyway. 2.5/5 for the novel-length logistics competence self-indulgence, I found that fun enough and the whole thing about loyalty and moral behaviour compelling enough to still in general enjoy this book. Wish it had been a bit more polished.

My sister likes this series, so I borrowed this on a whim from the library audiobook app. A pleasant light audiobook not needing much engagement, with two different readers covering the different perspective characters. I am not entirely convinced by the recasting in these books of fantasy-Victorian English exploration, archaeology and scientific expeditions as essentially benign, positive and only occasionally corrupted by scurrilous non-academic interest, but that did not detract very much from it, especially since this book Does engage with racism personal and societal, and I think it does that pretty well. In form, it has a lot of translation & notes on translation of an ancient text, which is pretty fun if you’re the kind of person who likes to read research notes.

All in all, fun, and works standalone even though I can tell it kind of spoils the endings of previous books by showing their main characters’ post-book situations! I am fairly likely to pick up another of these if it becomes available as a library audiobook & I want some more of the same kind of adventure.

Spoiler zone below. . . . . . . . . . . —- I also enjoyed the autistic character! It’s nice to see clearly neurodivergent people treated nicely in fiction. I would like to see Cora get that archive desk, and make friends & branch out into a freer life. And I’m glad that Audrey’s connection with Mornett was neither flattened into ‘I was over him the second he was racist’ (the passage from her diary talking about how he’s not Really racist, just has these very reasonable concerns, and can’t people be civil? was SO uncomfortable because it was I think very well observed) nor developed into ‘now that he has stopped imminently destroying Draconian artefacts and plotting to restrict their rights (and apologised for his incredibly shitty behaviour) he is a suitable romantic prospect again’. The way that played out was pretty satisfying for me.

I read this aloud as a bedtime story for a couple of months, and it worked really well. Mostly very short chapters mean plenty of built-in 'another chapter?' breaks; beautiful contemplative descriptions full of wonder, especially in the first half of the book; occasionally gently funny and slow-paced until the last fifth or so. Like Clarke's previous book, Piranesi has a style inspired by historical writing, this time 18th c British diaries, which was a plus for me (I was also reading an actual 18th c diary coincidentally, which was nice. Thomas Hollis' diary is available for free online & his handwriting is very readable...!). It's a lot shorter and less dense than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, quiet, often contemplative, and lovely to read.

Content warnings: Manipulation & gaslighting, violence (not particularly graphic)

Spoilers below: Strong plural vibes in this book, that don't end up (afaik as a non plural person) in any of the bad plural character holes.

I kept expecting the European Enlightenment style of the House and Piranesi's initial narration to be reframed from a beautiful and wise force to something reflecting the evils of actual Enlightenment thought & politics, but it ended up as mostly an aesthetic choice, if I'm not missing something. It's a very well executed book and, for example, the capitalization serves a narrative purpose very well, but I am a little wary or weary of mobilization of the neoclassical aesthetics of the Enlightenment, & Enlightenment-inspired exploration and categorization, to represent wisdom, truth, peace, tolerance etc without any acknowledgement of the slave trade & colonization that many of its thinkers were supported by and ideas were formed in response to. This is a mostly unformed thought and I have not read anything outside the book on its approach.

It’s fine! Nice light bombastically melodramatic reading, though with a lot of content warnings (I do like that they’re at the front of the book). I’m a sucker for mecha, especially weird, slightly more organic mecha, and this generally scratched that itch. The prose style doesn’t quite work for me and I don’t… think that it’s especially well written? But I’m giving it 3 cos I did enjoy it and was happy to suspend judgement of quality in order to have a nice time. The main character manages imo to be a Tough Female Character Who Hates Emotion and also very easy to root for, and it has some nice juicy twists of the sort that are fun to encounter in a YA novel.

Spoilers now:

There seemed to be a lot of potential for a genuinely complicated and difficult political situation, where the main character wrangled with complicity and compromise a little more, without a big heroic/villainous moment at the end where she gets to keep all of her power through essentially the ‘I am the House’ ending option in Fallout New Vegas. It was a fun power fantasy ending, but it felt like a way to avoid wrangling with more complex politics. But themes of complicity are not neglected, it seems to be deliberately focusing more on personal relationships and identity, and after all this kind of thing might come in more in the sequel that the book is very much aiming toward. Also all else unchanged it would have been a fairly miserable book without a moment where the beaten-down protag finds a way to somehow break out of the system she hates.

Additionally it must be said that the scenes of intimacy before they fade to black are just not great. There’s no real awful bits but, at least for me (which is a big disclaimer), I wasn’t even entirely sure what they were trying to tap into with the sensory description.

I would also have liked to see a little more of the time between Zetian meeting Shimin and hating him, and her being angry at him in a I’m-mad-I-have-feelings-for-you way. We get snippets of how his violence reminds her of her father and grandfather and makes her want to flinch and make herself small, and she confronts him about the deaths of women that he’s complicit in, but when she gets closer to him it didn’t come off to me as a serious and dramatic change in opinion, only as her feeling the same attraction and empathy for him since almost their first meeting. Which is allowed! It just feels like it dilutes the initial situation of, from her perspective, very justified fear and anger. I would have liked to see them trust each other less quickly and their relationship as something they each had to put more emotional work into. But, yknow, I kind of don’t want more time spent on the love triangle, so this works.

A nice way to spend a few tired hours :)