Reviews and Comments

Deborah Pickett

futzle@outside.ofa.dog

Joined 2 years, 2 months ago

Technical nonfiction and spec fiction. She/her. Melbourne, Australia. Generation X. Admin of Outside of a Dog. BDFL of Hometown (Mastodon) instance Old Mermaid Town (@futzle@old.mermaid.town). Avatar image is of a book that my dog tried to put on their inside.

My rating scale: ★ = I didn't care for it and probably didn't finish it; ★★ = It didn't inspire but I might have finished it anyway; ★★★ = It was fine; ★★★★ = I enjoyed it; ★★★★★ = I couldn't put it down.

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Existence (2013) 2 stars

In a future world dominated by a neural-link web where people can tune into live …

Overlong and indulgent, a short story in 880 pages

2 stars

Two stars for me means "I pushed through and finished it."

I haven't read any David Brin before, so all I knew was that he existed and that he had a series of books in his Uplift universe, which this wasn't part of.

This feels like a book in two parts: the first three quarters, full of detailed worldbuilding and a great deal of prose that turned out to be irrelevant, and the last quarter, featuring main characters that were only part of the ensemble cast in the first part, and a nemesis which was only mentioned in the barest of ways until then. I estimate that of that first three quarters, two thirds of it could have been safely edited out to make a lean 440-page novel with a coherent message.

Stylistically, Brin is pretty mediocre at writing women, so it's fortunate that there aren't many in this book. …

commented on Existence by David Brin

Existence (2013) 2 stars

In a future world dominated by a neural-link web where people can tune into live …

Content warning Plot element major spoilers

commented on Existence by David Brin

Existence (2013) 2 stars

In a future world dominated by a neural-link web where people can tune into live …

I have no fucking idea yet what is going on in this book.

This edition has unexplained dotted underlines randomly under some words. I can explain them away as faux hyperlinks in the Helvetica sections but they are in the Times New Roman sections too. Is there some clever spy code revealed later in the novel, or did the typesetter forget to turn off spellcheck in their word processor? It’s quite offputting.

Consorts Of Heaven (2009, Gollancz) 3 stars

A bridge from fantasy to sf

3 stars

The blurb on the back of this book says that it’s a standalone story in the same universe as Fenn’s first book, Principles of Angels, which I haven’t read. That claim is probably a bit of a stretch because I feel like I’ve been dealt plot spoilers on the first book now.

This novel begins as a straight fantasy in a village in a land that draws heavily on Middle-Ages Celtic culture. As world-building, it’s fine and detailed, but not my cup of tea, and it felt slow and drawn out. Fortunately the trope gets subverted about halfway through the book as it pivots—quite suddenly—to a science fiction adventure.

The reliance on Celtic legend, not something I’m very familiar with, left me confused at times, and it might have led to my feeling that the climax had an element of deus ex machina. A bit of earlier application of …

To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Paperback, 2020, Hodder Paperbacks) 4 stars

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through …

A human adventure in space, in four acts

4 stars

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago. Like all of Chambers's books, it feels as though nothing much is going on in them at any given moment, but in a good way. There are interpersonal relationships continuously developing and evolving, there's the discoveries about the planets that the explorers land on, and then there is the revelation about events back on Earth which the explorers, 17 light years away, can do nothing about.

For such a simple and shortish story, I found the revelation at the end to be suitably profound, as well as the way Chambers left unanswered, but in a satisfying way, some of the questions about what had happened back on Earth.