Reviews and Comments

This book is in a lot of ways more of everything that Three Body Problem was. It's a huger sweep, a pretty intense exploration of how getting thrown into responsibility can break people, and it builds on a lot of the ideas of the first book about how ununified people would be in response to a threat like this - stuff that now looks rather prescient after a year and a half of covid. It does also suffer from the same weaknesses, perhaps even intensified. In particular there's not much dialogue that is really characters being theirselves as opposed to Liu exploring an idea through his characters. But the good parts were so compelling that this was far from ruining the book for me.

I was left with a few questions, two of which seem like weaknesses of the book: 1) Why did Ye pick Luo to have the conversation with that she does in the preface? 2) How did any other humans know that Luo would be important? (that conversation with Ye explains Trisolaris's interest - clearly they'd have been surveilling her intensely) 3) How is there a third book? Three Body Problem left the story with an obvious lead in for a sequel, but the ending to this book could have been a series ending. I am now intrigued and want to see where Liu takes this next.

First things first, some content warnings about the book: it contains a lot of violence, a narrator who uses ableist language and ideas repeatedly, and a sort of sensory-illusion body horror that I thought was one of the book's strong points but could be deeply disturbing for the wrong reader.

I want to like this book. It does a great job of imagining aliens who are very deeply alien and in unsettling ways. And at it's best it's a tautly narrated story of the terrifying encounter with them. It also plays some amusing games with vampire tropes, and poses interesting questions about what counts as life, sentience, intelligence, etc.

But I found some of the author's tics grating enough to really put me off. The voice is irritatingly macho-male, to the extent that it makes me, a cis man, want to yell at the author to shut up and cede the mic. In the first half there's a really clunky tendency to do foreshadowing very explicitly, which intensifies the macho storytelling feel. And the narrator is consistently casually ableist, even though there are aspects of the overall story and the narrator's life history which push back hard on the same.

I'm glad I read it, but not sure I can really recommend it.

This is a quick, fun read that's full of hackneyed themes but made a welcome palate cleanser between some quite heavy books.

I found it interesting how this book brought in some contemporary-world themes around refugees and their abusers, but that's not explored particularly deeply, it's just one more reason to cheer on Murderbot as it does its thing. Really this is just one more Murderbot instalment, and I am so very here for that.

This is the sort of near-future sci-fi that's really just one fictional innovation away from the world it was written in, and clearly used as a lens to look at ourselves. It follows one very relatable family and their challenges in adapting--and in some ways being unable to adapt--to a wave of fast social change. I identified strongly enough with each of the main characters in some way that each of their crises broke my heart a little.

The ending wrapped things up a little too neatly and I found that particularly disappointing because it broke the easy belieavability of the rest of the book. But the rest was so good that I can't hold it against book or author.

Cresswell is a recovering academic geographer, whose poetry is deeply rooted in appreciation of places, particularly London where he lived at the time he wrote this collection. And yet some of the poems I found the most affecting were about the non-places of airports and travel. All in all a wonderful collection.

I read this book a few months ago with the #SFFBookClub. The setting and imagery are still haunting me, but I found the writing itself sort of clumsy, to the point that while actually reading it diminished the impact, much of which came later as I digested the ideas of the book.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and it's the kind of juicy food for thought that I've spent the week since finishing it digesting. Elements of it felt like an homage to The Left Hand of Darkness, but not heavily enough that to get in the way of Griffith having her own story to tell. There's also a big echo of the stories of early European colonies losing people because they either couldn't handle the environment they were trying to colonise or "went native", liking the cultures they were supposed to subjugate better than their own.

It's beautifully written too, but at times some of the human interactions felt implausibly easy. We get the protagonist almost dying a few times, but she seems to settle in to a wholly alien culture quicker & more easily than I've managed moving between countries on one planet. And the resolution at the end of the book feels too convenient.

SFFBookClub

I love how this book takes on heavy themes of racism and ostracism with a light but never insubstantial touch. It also contains the best skewering I've yet to read of Portland/Seattle "right-on" but clueless middle-class white culture. I found the resolution at the end a little too quick, as is common in YA books, but I appreciated how it left more complexity and ambiguity at the end than is usual for YA.

This is a strong second book in the series, which doesn't feel quite as rich as Black Tides but does advance the story nicely and draws Mokoya more fully than she had a chance to be drawn in Black Tides.[return][return]Note that Tor markets this as a co-first book in the series, but I think it's much better to start with The Black Tides of Heaven. I read this with a book club who hadn't all read Black Tides yet, and many of us ended up putting this one aside to read that first, and enjoying this one more after.