Reviews and Comments

Upon finishing this book and reading the author's list of people he'd like to thank, I was slightly disappointed not to see the late Douglas Adams there. Because there is no doubt that the writing style was strongly influenced by HHGTTG and other works in that series.

This isn't sci-fi, at least not in the traditional sense, but neither is it fantasy in the traditional sense. It's in some ways akin to the worlds built by Neil Gaiman, where a normal existence is suddenly overlaid by elements of the fantastic. And if you like Gaiman, and Pratchett, and Adams and so on, you'll probably enjoy this.

The downsides: this was the author's first novel, and it shows. There are some over-complicated plots, and the cast of characters is perhaps a little too large to fully get to grips with, and as every one of them has more than one unpleasant character flaw it's hard to feel much sympathy for the plight of any of them. But it's a good story with some nice touches and a couple of unexpected twists in the tale.

What happens if you take the classic space opera format -- soldiers! weapons! aliens! humanity fighting for its very survival! -- and give it a queer, feminist, 21st century twist? You get Some Desperate Glory, that's what.

The book manages to walk the tightrope of combining hard sci-fi themes with social science fiction, and manages to pull it off in style.

(Minor spoilers ahead)

The primary character, Kyr, is a teenage soldier in the vein of Starship Troopers or Ender's Game, brought up from birth to be one of humanity's last living soldiers on a secret base where the few remaining humans have their resistance movement. So far, so expected.

But as the book progresses we see Kyr's black-and-white view of the world gradually peeled back and altered as she gains access to other, hidden and banned points of view.

Without going into too much spoilery detail, over the course of the book's 500-or-so pages we accompany Kyr on this journey of discovery and it's a fast, exciting, scary and emotional ride. The characters are well written and believable and although the plot occasionally becomes convoluted, it's well worth persevering.

I've only read one book by Christopher Priest before, A Dream of Wessex.

This one, Inverted World, is not in any way related to that but has a similar quality in that you gradually learn about the strange world in which the narrator lives by following their own disoveries about that world.

By around two-thirds of the way through the nature of the world starts to become not just apparent but largely explained, although the reason for its existence don't get touched upon until the very final few pages of the story.

And the story felt ... truncated. I wasn't clear to me what the final resolution was or what Helward (the main character) was going to do, or indeed what any of the characters were going to do next. I honestly feel like it could have done with another 50 pages or so to tie everything up.

Still, it's a mind-bending piece of work and doesn't take too long to read. The prose flows well and is easy to read even in the 2020s, which can't be said for all 1970s sci-fi.

This starts out very much like a classic fantasy story: a disparate group of adventurers are thrown together on a swords-and-sorcery epic quest to save the world from an unspeakable evil.

But quite quickly you start to realise it's something more than that. The author is a huge AD&D fan and lots of the concepts from that start to appear in the book. After all, every decent D&D campaign also features a fighter, a magic user, a cleric, and an archer.

The world seems loosely based on Celtic Scotland, and the story has the right combination of set battle pieces and world/character building to keep everything moving along nicely. The characters are varied and all have just enough human flaws and failings to be believable.

(Very very mild spoiler warning): There is a plot twist at the end of the story that I'm pretty sure you won't see coming until it comes up and wallops you with the force of Level 10 Cast Fireball spell. At which point you'll be sitting there dazed and amazed and flicking back through the book to look at all the little giveaway signs that you completely failed to notice the first time through!

Without a doubt this is one of my favourite classic-style fantasy books that I've read for quite some time.

I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped to.

The plot is broad in scope and sweeps across a period of a couple of millennia. Although set almost 60,000 years in the future it touches upon (and in some cases dives deeply into) themes that are very relevant in the 21st century, and the writing is generally engaging.

So why didn't I really like it? A couple of things: the structure of the book (three sections each set approx. 1,000 years apart) meant that just as you were starting to really understand some of the characters they were left by the wayside and a whole new set of individuals got introduced. At the end of each section it felt to me that there was still a lot of potential development of both plot and characters, and maybe this book could have worked better if each section was significantly expanded and extended and published as a trilogy.

(minor spoilers below)

I also felt that for a book where the overarching theme seemed to be "small people" fighting back against money-driven capitalist corporations, there was one glaring problem. Namely: if over the next 55,000 years the socio-economic structure of society doesn't really change from the current capitalist one, that's a very depressing message for anyone who would like to see change.

And seeing as the novel is written almost entirely from the POV of characters who WOULD like to see change that strikes me as a very odd way to approach it. Essentially the author seems to be saying "although it would be wonderful to see The System overturned, people have been trying to achieve that for 50,000+ years without success. So it's never going to happen".

This is the third -- and I believe final -- installment in Adrian Tchaikovsky's acclaimed Children of Time series.

The action once again moves on to another alien world but with many of the same characters and species from the earlier two books. And of course we are introduced to additional new intelligences, as you'd expect from the earlier stories' trajectories.

However it took me well over half the book to really get into it. The multiple plots seemed not only hard to keep track of, but self-contradictory at times as well. Eventually everything does fall into place and there are enough plot twists to keep you intrigued right to the end, but there were definitely times when I had to force myself to keep reading as the frustration was starting to get too much.

I'm glad I kept going, though. In the last third of the book many of the earlier confusion gets resolved, and that's what's bumped it up from a three-star to a four-star review.

It is ultimately a good book in the end, although it's definitely more openly philosophical and introspective than the previous two. If you like Tchaikovsky's work and are prepared to stick with it, this is rewarding.