Reviews and Comments

This is the book to read when beginning to tire of Iain Banks's non-scifi formula. It starts out seeming, well, pretty formulaic, but as the plot develops it becomes clear that the author realised he was in danger of falling into that sort of rut, and decided to play with the expectations that he'd set up. The result is one of his lighter and more laugh-out-loud funny novels, even though at the same time it has some pretty pointed things to say about a thoroughly regrettable period of recent history, and in hindsight about the things that white men get away with. My one criticism is that at times the protagonist's political rants--which were clearly Banks speaking through a character--get self-indulgently long. Even agreeing with him I found myself wanting him to shut up and move the story on at times.

This book also captures the zeitgeist of 2001/02 London really beautifully - a time I remember particularly vividly because it was the last couple of years of me living in London's orbit.

I would recommend not reading this one until you've read a few of his others. It stands alone, but some of the surprises would have had less impact if I'd read it with a less of an expectation of what Iain Banks did.

A great continuation of Danielle Cain's story, which fleshes some of the supporting characters out nicely and expands on the ideas. It pushes the fantasy element a lot further, and I didn't quite feel that it could sustain that all the way.

A powerful, gripping book, that suffers a little from leaving some of its most potentially interesting characters insufficiently fleshed out.[return][return]It wonderfully subverts typical hero / saviour narratives, and complicates questions about who holds power and who is on the "good" or "bad" side of a conflict. But it still renders its privileged non-heroes a lot more three-dimensional than any of the less privileged people who as a collective this book is largely about.

A great survey of a very diverse field. Some work that kicks back hard at settler bullshit; some that is much more contemplative and/or personal. Like any such collection I didn't love all of it, but I've ended up putting books by more than half of the features poets on my wishlist, which I think is great success for a compilation.

I loved that this is a sci-fi/action novel in which the driving conflict is not resolved by force or technology, and I love the picture it paints of the interstellar-cosmopolitan university. I wanted more character development--a bit more of Binti ethnicity and excellence, but mainly a few other fleshed-out characters--but I'm also mindful of how short a book this is. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series and wonder if it will scratch that itch.

This was a lovely read. Although it's set in a rich fictional future which Chambers has clearly written a lot of history and sociology for, I enjoyed how that was background, not the point of the story. It's not a story about empires rising and falling, or historic heroes, just of a group of people getting through a series of challenges together. And while those people start out feeling like caricatures, they get progressively more believable as the book goes on, to the point that by the end I was very invested in their fates - not because The Fate Of The Galaxy Depends On Them, but just because they were interesting personalities I'd developed some affection for.

A fun romp through an alternate history in which the swampier parts of the US were given over to hippo rearing (which was apparently a serious proposal around the end of the 19th Century). By the end the characters felt a little flat and the plot a bit too absurd.

I read this in a day and haven't stopped thinking about in the couple of weeks since. It's an incredibly uncomfortable read. At the end I was angry with Butler for writing such a grotesque scenario, but on reflection that reaction amounts to shooting the messenger. It's an absolutely brutal exploration of what complete loss of autonomy does to people

A strange and astonishing book. By far my favourite thing about it is the language: a mix of deeply lyrical--almost scriptural--descriptive prose, bluntly brutal action and thoroughly colloquial dialogue that I wouldn't have expected to work, but Wilson pulls off flawlessly. For that alone I would have kept reading for hundreds more pages, but there are also some great characters, an intriguing fantasy world that at first looks like it's going for some cheap outs but resists those temptations, and a decent plot. The plot is actually the least interesting part of this book, but everything is so good that I don't care.

I didn't end up finishing this book. For about a third of the way through I found it utterly charming--the old sci-fi clunkiness, cheesy puns and the fairy-tale style--then the second third got more and more repetitive, and then I decided I'd read enough. I'd recommend any one or two of the stories in this, but it really didn't have enough ideas to sustain it through the whole collection.

I got this on the strength of Stålenhag's paintings, which I'd seen online and made up a completely different backstory for (standard dystopian scifi). What he actually does is much more interesting: it's very much a young boy's fantasy but told well enough to be an engaging read as an adult. And of course the paintings are gorgeous: a very familiar 80s European suburbia made strange and unsettling.

An absolute delight! As a thought experiment about different ways gender might work, this is already an excellent, compelling book, but its genius is that it's also a compelling story, a great exploration of how people react to the unfamiliar, and an exposition of Le Guin's daoism, and a critique of nationalism. Somehow she managed to cram all of those things into one not especially long book and make it work well as all of them together.

I'm very late to discovering how great Le Guin was--this is the first non-YA novel I've read by her--and wishing I'd started much earlier.

An absolute joy of a book. It takes the form of a lot of fantasy and/or fairy tale cliches but repeatedly twists them into much more interesting things, and takes on some pretty grim thematic content without being a grim read overall. I loved how bluntly it dealt with antisemitism and the purposes that prejudice serves, and the repeated thread through the whole book of people who looked greedy or outright evil from the inside looking reasonable and/or desperate once the author lets us see the character's own perspective.

That said, I hated Miryem's ending. It felt like a very jarring return to fairy tale cliches, and I'm basically pretending that the last 2-3 pages of a book that I otherwise adored simply don't exist.