Reviews and Comments

Despite being set in the same universe, this is not a Clocktaur Wars book. I think it's best described as a slow-paced romance between a woman and her magic sword.

I loved it at first, because of the conceit of a magic sword story told partially from the perspective of the sword. I continued to enjoy it throughout thanks to the humour in the writing, and to the author's usual ability to produce characters with silly quirks who nevertheless feel realistic... but at the same time I found parts of it slow: the story had to go through a great many places to get to the end, but much of this felt repetitive - reflected in-world by the characters mostly travelling up and down the same bit of road repeatedly! This felt a bit prolonged, and I think some sequences could have been omitted. And that's why only three stars. Probably three and a half if I could.

Plus points for unconventional protagonists, unremarked queerness in-universe, shades-of-grey ethics that aren't heavy-handed, and a wonderful unremarked non-binary secondary character.

Mmmmmm.

I liked it. Don't get me wrong, 3 stars isn't a bad review. It was easy enough to read, with a solid enough story. I liked the exploration of layers of reality, and the nature of myths and fables, where there is perhaps no clear or meaningful answer to "is this real". The way in which this is done is... perhaps not as subtle as the author thinks it is, but OK.

I find it unbelievable that daemon separation is as common as it is in this book, and yet it is not known (except via the exotic technique at Bolvanger) to the experimental theologians of a decade earlier. Indeed, unknown to society at large, even though they might not speak of it.

A conclusion would have been nice - this feels less like the middle of a trilogy and more like the first half of a two-part book. And.... I can't help feeling that Pullman's writing is more and more that of not just an older white man, but an older white man who is a little too comfortable within the walls of an Oxford college.

Still, I enjoyed it, and I'll read the third one when it appears.

I'd give this 4.5 stars if I could.

I started off not liking it as much as I had The Fated Sky. It took a while to realise that it's very very nearly as good, but it's a different kind of book. Where its two predecessors were stories of a woman, and of a team, overcoming obstacles of physics, of misfortune, and of politics to reach a goal... this one is a (v minor spoiler)detective book, as our protagonist searches for a saboteur on the moon base.

Layered beneath this, of course, are the same believable characters, the same alternate-1960s gender and race politics, the same allegories to the short-termism and climate change denial of our own world (is it an allegory? It is climate change denial, just some decades sooner), and of course the same fantastic writing. And that rarity of rarities in space stories, a woman in her 50s as protagonist.

Read. But do read the other books first.

Ready Player One was never great writing. It was full of plot holes, it was undisguised wish fulfillment, and I still loved it - because (at least to me) it wasn't trying to be great. It was a simple and fun romp through nostalgia, and it excelled at being that.

RP2 tries to widen its scope and take on more weighty themes.... but the writing hasn't grown up to match the content. It feels clumsy, at times preachy, and implausible. My suspension of disbelief has gone. At times it's still a fun, fast-paced romp, and I enjoyed those parts as such, but then I was brought up short by the complete absence of character development in the 3-4 years since the end of the first book, and then the way that a fundamentally broken relationship can be repaired so that the hero can get the girl by the end, despite nothing in their disagreement actually having changed...

Nope.