Reviews and Comments

Reference in Dominion

What a name

Sale rack in Forbidden Planet

It's another TJ Klune book. I didn't like it as much as the House in the Cerulean Sea. The protagonist is supposed to be "bad" but not-really-a-spoiler, redeems himself. Except unlike Cerulean, where there's a slow change of someone discovering themselves (albeit with a lot of foreshadowing), in this one we have one scene of Wallace being bad, then a few chapters of being dead and confused, and then he's nice.

And again without being "too" funny. Scalzi has reached a good balance now and it's a treat. I didn't like the start of this one though, as it begins with a news account of a match and it just doesn't really read like a news account at all. I realise it's there for worldbuilding but I found it weak and jarring. The rest of the book is much better though.

I think if I'd read this in 2014 I'd believe a lot more that the world economy would change to support survivors of a pandemic. The one described here is much worse than COVID, and there's also a bit of cynicism about how it affected the wealthy, but still now I think society would prefer to forget.

However it's a great thriller, with some interesting ideas although some of the tech and biology doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The characters are funny without being "too funny" which I think Scalzi has strayed into before.

Getting distracted in this by the primary sources!

Railway surveyor travelogue

Comic fans, this does neatly end which is a special joy.

This book has car-sized bugs that have evolved in a few years. Somehow. And all the neat tech that everyone suddenly got, that all got done during this apocalypse as well.

This is a lovely piece of art, really enjoyable to look at. But the plot doesn't make sense. Gravity is off. And it has been off since the protagonist was a baby. And she's barely 20. But lots of people have forgotten what gravity was like. And you can zip off if you fire a gun down, which isn't really how momentum works.

Bought this a long time ago, and re-reading it on coming out of the attic. It's a good set of near-future-twenty-years-ago sci-fi thrillers. In some ways it's funny to read now as some tech in it is here and boring now, and some stuff we know is much harder, and yet more bits are politically less palatable. As is the author.

But there's a network of experts that's sort of a secret but most people know about them (like Torchwood) and they all have Ellis' trademark catchy swearing.

I have not read any other Recluce books so at this point it feels like a very generic fantasy book, although not in a bad way. It's well written, the world building is interesting. The character is growing up and learning about this world bit by bit.

It'd be nicer if he was slightly less interested in boobs. And there's only so many books I can read in my life where the adolescent is told by everyone "study X" and he whines about it for most of the book and then does do X and lo and behold it works. Yeah, it's very believable, but I can have less realism.

The travelogue parts of the book do have a lot more struggle with the weather and food, which is nice.

This is my third or fourth Culture book, and probably the one I liked least. Basically (theme on all my dislikes) I didn't like the characters, even the protagonist. And his motivation of "this side of the war, I guess" just didn't really feel like it held up.

I think on a re-read I'd be less irritated by how the protagonist (admittedly, realistically) just lurches from situation to situation without any real overarching plan, but as with every other Banks book, I struggle to summarise the plot simply. A lot of things happen but their end relation to the plot on the cover is low.

I seem to be getting increasingly partial to historic voyages, so some bias here. But the author manages to flesh out characters with a lot of (clearly flagged) speculation to fill in blanks. He also resists spoiling the result of the 280 year old story.

If you like starvation and scurvy, this book has a lot.