Reviews and Comments

why did i read this

I'm going to grant Ms. Cogman some leeway because it's her first novel, and when it's your first novel, 87 becoming 88 ten pages later is just a thing that happens. But if you can't do detail, at least do variety. It's like a Doctor Who episode where they just chase Sherlock Holmes for a whole hour.

A good read but the last third of the book really peters out.

Trying to do a lot in too little a space. You have a generational ship in a two-hundred-year-mission to investigate a possible alien device and they live and love and fight and die and get there and the book is still not half over. It forces a lot of stuff to be skimmed over.

But having each generation be clones of the previous one is brilliant and will be very helpful for the TV adaptation.

It has some great ideas, but a lot of it is set up for the rest of the trilogy and I hear the rest of the trilogy is super depressing so I don't think I'll be reading further. I made that mistake with the Rama trilogy, not again.

Couldn't get into it, and if you can't get into an Iain Banks book you might as well give up there and then because there's no way you're gonna find out what an Archiproctor is later.

A fictional story that serves as a good exploration of how biology, mechanics and weather could work in a 2D environment.

The plot's kinda crummy, though.

I'm getting the hang of Claire North books: very long-lived dudes that travel to a lot of nice, historic places.

This really should have been a comic or videogame, or anything with more of a visual component to it. I hadn't even realized it was possible to get myself this mixed up in regard to cardinal directions.

"Alright, imagine two cities existing in the same physical space."

"Sounds cool."

"It is cool!"

"Then what happens?"

"... Crimes or something?"