Reviews and Comments

The biggest feeling I come away from James Islington's Hierarchy series is that it seems like it should appeal to fans of Brandon Sanderson. If the first book was an introduction to the world and young protagonist, this second book is much happier to dish out worldbuilding details about what's going on in the larger world(s). It's a grippy action book, and the way the worldbuilding is slowly revealed is my favorite part of this book. The second book also manages to pull out its own big ending surprises to drive who knows what will happen in the next one.

My biggest complaint is that this is primarily a plot-driven book and the protagonist is a bit too special. If there is a competition or challenge of any sort, Vis is going to overcome it every single time, no matter the odds, and no matter if he's never fought in magic armor or snuck into a pyramid or driven in a magic chariot race or trained to be a dancer or whatever. The book doesn't leave that much room for characterization, and secondary characters are pretty heavy-handed about their one-note thematic opinions.

Overall, I just wish the characters were a bit less flat. I feel like this is the kind of book I would have devoured when I was younger, but cool worldbuilding isn't quite enough sustenance these days.

The situation was terrifying, but the project itself was awesome.

A bunch of my friends were rereading this book before the movie came out, so I thought I'd join along. Project Hail Mary is another space engineering procedural with Andy Weir protagonist voice. The characters are pretty thin, but I think you're reading this for the science problem solving. I always appreciate interspersed flashbacks (especially here where there's a bit of a reason why Grace continues to remember more over time).

I also personally don't know that this book makes for especially great movie material, but what do I know. (On this reread, there was also some airquotes jokes that really didn't land for me along the lines of "wow it'd be bad if I were fatphobic/racist/a pedophile" and I'm throwing a few side eyes.)

joke tagline: a secret former prince struggles to move up the ladder at magic school for future senators in post-apocalyptic fantasy Rome

It's grippy. It's bloody and violent at times. The fantasy worldbuilding was fun. I wouldn't quite say it's YA, but it is also a young protagonist in a school setting where some moments resonate with the Hunger Games. It was enjoyable in a childhood need for fantasy book with a young protagonist in a capitalist-metaphor magic dystopia sort of way.

What this book does especially well for me is how many different directions it pulls the main character in. He's keeping his past a secret and trying to follow his own goals while simultaneously investigating a mystery, being suborned by rebels, and trying to succeed at school. There's a lot of lying and sneaking that's delicious. Being overconstrained by external forces helps balance out the plot elements of Vis being too capable across multiple disciplines.

It's also got some excellent plot twists (more like twist of the knife for Vis) as well as some wild worldbuilding at the end setting up for who knows what book two (or three or four) will look like.

Dead Hand Rule is third (of four) books in Max Gladstone's Craft Wars sequence. Interestingly to me, this book works a lot better for me than Wicked Problems did.

Their power might be vast, but it was bound, as surely as any djinn’s: to wield it they had to be themselves, and they could not act in ways unlike them. If we let them sit there growling at one another across conference tables, that’s all they’ll do, until the stars fall down.

I've seen Gladstone pitch this book as featuring "wizard Davos", which sounds like it shouldn't be good, but somehow works. The heart of this series is economics (via magic metaphor) and this book features large powers in the world coming together, but not actually able to work with each other to stop impending doom. The end of the world is coming, and they're all working to try to get a short-term or long-term advantage over the other rather than to try to stop the invasion of spider capitalism gods.

Some of what also worked in this book is my own expectations. I loved the narrow character focus of Dead Country and its themes. I was unprepared for the second book's extended Marvel Universe shift into bringing every character we've ever known onto the page. This was also a shift from all of the previous Craft Sequence books, which tended to be more self-contained. In any case, I was more prepared for what the scope of the third book would be, but I also feel like it was more tightly written. The focus felt much more on Tara and Kai as primary point of view characters, and interspersed others as needed.

Subjectively, it felt like characters had a little bit more room to breathe rather than be pulled by the madcap plot. I think some of this is the the plot all takes place in and around Alt Columb (which is where the first Craft Sequence book in publication order takes place). All the players of interest are already in the same place, rather than jumping around the world and picking up additional parts of the cast.

All in all, I quite enjoyed it and am deeply looking forward to the final book in the sequence to see what comes.

Small things I really enjoyed about this book that I'll list without any context: * the Donnie and Gav comedy routine * fucking Eberhardt Jax * Denovo's machinations coming back much more strongly here * Elayne Ex Machina * Abelard coming into his own too * nonexistent Temoc/Kopil shippers eating well

(Also a shout out to the Hidden Schools blog which has a lot of series analysis, but especially has a great "story so far" summation prior to this book.)

This book was not for me. Maybe I was in the wrong space for reading it, but it felt like YA (derogatory). Everything felt a little too thin and pulled along by a plot. Folks who are at odds with each other resolve those feelings too quickly or in ways that feel unearned. (Especially feelings around Alekhai and Sijara both.)

There were a lot (a lot) of fight scenes. To me a good fight scene is like a good sex scene--there needs to be some character development driving it or I'm going to be bored. Many of these fell flat for me, but positively I really liked the one where Fen meets Alekhai for the first time, because there's so much going on emotionally for her there.

The book has so much intriguing drive-by worldbuilding, but none of it feels connected to the whole. Declaration ceremonies for names and genders come up and are never mentioned again. The world is full of nanites? Undetectable alien neural chips?! The Accusers could have been been building infrastructure and teleporting food the whole time? Resurrected people are supposed to come back not quite the same, but this never happens (emotionally or mentally)?

I was really intrigued by the idea of the ecologically failing Newearth, and the capital letters of the Makers, Accusers, and Executors who constructed the situation and are still present. Unfortunately, they are all ultimately set dressing for the rebellion against the king who must die, and none of it truly gets fleshed out to any satisfying degree.

The fantasy politics of this world also felt a bit short. The word anarchism is only used once as a pejorative, and the replacement for the titular king is the glory of democracy. With minimal spoilers, the "mini boss" that must be faced before the "final boss" is group infighting. I'm not sure if I had a specific desire from this novel, but I was hoping there'd be something more weird, more speculative, more interesting. Maybe it's just me, but this kind of arc is not enough for me these days (and democracy doesn't really feel like the shiniest of destinations either).

Minorly, I saw a blurb that Alekhai is supposed to be trans-coded, but I'm not sure I see it. Is it just because everybody says he's so beautiful (as all of my trans friends are)? Is it that he says he would have used a randomizer for his declaration ceremony if he could? I would credit this more if I felt like it came up in any other way.

I don't like to complain about a book so much, but sometimes I have to articulate all the things that didn't work in order to understand my own feelings. A story about found family and the destruction of empire should have resonated with me a lot more deeply. I don't feel like this book was bad more than I was just disappointed--it didn't cohere for me and live up to what I hoped it could be.

(This was the #SFFBookClub pick for February 2026.)

I always enjoy Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle stories. There's something about the idea of monks going around and collecting knowledge and stories that manages to always be compelling.

A Mouthful of Dust is a short novella centered on food, survival, and secrets that don't want to be revealed. It did not dislodge Mammoths at the Gates as my favorite Singing Hills book, but it was still an enjoyable snack.

Thanks as always go to my agent, Diana Fox, who told me back in 2020 that maybe the world wasn’t ready for famine and eating babies. Then in 2024, she said, “Okay, they may be ready now,” and here we are.

Along with having a recipe for curry, I was amused at some of the author's notes at the end of the book.

Classic Scalzi popcorn, spiced with snark.

It's a solid book, don't get me wrong. Good foreshadowing and callbacks. Good worldbuilding for the series and setup for future books. The plot was grippy in the moment.

My biggest disappointment is that protagonist's defining characteristic is that she's naught more than a hypercompetent ball of snark; it makes her uninteresting, and it felt like we were told more about her emotions from her father than we got shown ourselves.

This was one of the books up for the #SFFBookClub poll that didn't win. The airquotes downside of putting the polls together is that everything on there is something I want to read, so I end up reading them all anyway.

This book was pitched as "a generation ship novel in verse" and it delivered. It felt like such a fresh way to talk about old concepts, and its flowery imagery felt less out of place than it would have in prose. It could have stood to be more weird, but each point of view had striking and effectively different styles, especially in terms of format, but also in imagery and tone and pacing. Overall, the plot didn't strike me as being particularly novel, but it was enjoyable and that wasn't really why I was coming to this book in the first place.

Hey you! (Yes, you!) If you're seeing this, then you probably have an adjacent taste in books, so this could likely be of interest to you.

We're reading The King Must Die during this February for #SFFBookClub.

SFFBookClub is an asynchronous fediverse book club. There's no meeting or commitment. If this book looks interesting to you, then you can join in by reading it during February and posting on the hash tag #SFFBookClub with any feelings or thoughts or reviews or quotes.

More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/

This is one of those 5/5 ratings where I don't think the book is perfect, but it gets it because it is so intensely targeted at my own interests and I'm so grateful to have read it. Some bullet points to entice you:

• anti-capitalism, anti-cop
• train heists
• found family vibes
• first person point of view with an internalized narration to a second person "you"
• fantasy religions that don't feel like direct analogies of real ones
• revenge plot and revolutionaries
• gaaaaaaay

The book is so unapologetically queer and kinky, it's great. The author credits Stone Butch Blues (among many other things) in the end notes, which feels entirely unsurprising. The gender-y and queer bits also both intersect with the in-world religions in realistic ways.

It's a book that desperately needs a map; there's a pile of countries, religions, and politics especially when it hits the Chauncey estate section. The book does a good job of keeping it all ~~straight~~ queerly differentiated but the world has so much texture--it's a ttrpg campaign setting crying out for illustration! It also feels like a living world; characters having a life both off-page and outside of the protagonist make it feel even more real.

The book opens with a labor dispute and police violence and sworn revenge, but from there it doesn't shy away from critiques of power and incrementalism and reformers. There's some wild rich people monologues where they unintentionally bare themselves as soulless vampires. There's a bandit charade of a hidden equitable country, pretending to be part of a baronial system.

Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that's long gone.

I found the writing to be a delight: the narrator is at times unreliable, and the writing is full of dreamy metaphors. At times, somebody will bust out with a multi-page exposition about religion, or a set of introductions to a full dramatis personae worth of baronets. The final lap of the book has its own tonal shift that I won't get into for reasons. Somehow this all held together for me; maybe it's that none of these parts overstayed their welcome. I'm sure some folks will bounce off of this writing style, but I'm not folks, that's for sure.

Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.

In the end, this is a fuck yeah revenge story about disaster queers fighting capitalism with violence. It's less about answers or even hope, and more about conveying a sense of angry determinism working for a future none of them will see.

No matter how much I liked the first two books, this book was "just ok". I think it just wasn't as philosophical as the first and it didn't have the thematic strength of the second. There were some attempts to tie together metaphor through the family tree but it felt more told than shown for me.

(And to my eye, there were some missed opportunities for connections and depth. So many hooks of ideas that could have connected better: the chives vs baomind mind over distance, human desire for narratives, human tendencies towards binary thinking, or the way humans treat AIs.)

Overall, this is an interesting trilogy of books. Every book has a different protagonist and a very different feeling to it; there's some loose continuity going on, but it's more like a series of different windows into this universe rather than a strong arc plot. It's not what I expected at all.

I mentioned that I felt like the previous book had a bit of a mystery vibe to it, and that continues here. To be clear, I think both of these are "mystery adjacent action" where there's some attempted murders and mysterious goings-on; in both cases, it's there as a way to build tension and not as the main vehicle for the novel or something the reader could solve on their own.

Also, pettily I had some minor complaints which maybe made this book less enjoyable:

This book opens with Sun off on a far away research trip without her wife and kids. I wrote a note to myself at the time: "is every book in this trilogy going to be about absent family?" In this case, no. Sun's wife Salvie surprises Sun by showing up with the kids.

Salvie has some neat backstory of not fitting into the alien gender roles of her species (which we don't hear enough about), and then in practice she's got a single facet: the supportive wife for Sun's problems. Sure, the story isn't about her, but... also... it could be more about her. It's made worse for me that Sun is so often resentful(!) of Salvie, especially around her showing up unexpectedly. Even this point of conflict and resentment felt over very quickly and not processed very thoroughly. (It should also be noted that Sun left the kids that she didn't want to take care of with Salvie to do full-time parenting for five years.)

And that sort of leads me into the other point, is that maybe I just didn't enjoy Sun as a main character? In a world full of rightminding, Sun felt incredibly emotionally immature and deregulated. Their interaction with their kids felt like a very trope-y arc, especially with her feeling paranoid and overprotective. (If her behavior towards her children had tied in more clearly to her backstory about hab failure trauma, maybe this would have felt more nuanced?)

Finally, the main nemesis figure (Vickee Devine) felt quite flat. It was INCREDIBLY funny for Sun to bring up this long-time academic and personal rival, only to have said rival's entrance be showing up piloting a spaceship (surprise ferrying Sun's wife and kids) and then doing some hot shot flying during a pirate skirmish to save Sun. Overall though, I was expecting more of a twist or some nuance with her character. In the book there was even a direct nod to Malka Older's narrative disorder and the bias that Sun feels towards Vickee and tries to ignore, which felt like an opportunity for some other story to be told here; in the end it seemed to be exactly what it said on the tin.

This book was not what I expected. It's got a different protagonist than the first book, and also steps a bit more into mystery and horror genres. It's also a second book in a series that I liked better than the first, if such a thing is possible.

I think this book starts off with a bit of almost space horror, with Dr. Jens investigating a ghost colony ship and trying to figure out what's gone wrong with its ancient crew that are now all in cryo. If I had to try to pin some genre on it, I'd say the bulk of the book feels like mystery/space politics with the start leaning horror and the end leaning action. It's a tasty blend for me, specifically.

What I liked the most about this book is how characterization and themes tied in so strongly to the plot. Dr. Jens wears an exo (prosthetic adaptive exoskeleton) for her constant pain; talking obliquely to avoid spoilers, the climax of the novel revolves around her confronting her relationship with her disability and her exo. The book also deals quite a bit with what it means to have faith (in institutions, but also friends, and religiously).

I am amused a little at how much Master Chief Carlos feels like the gender anachronauts from Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. Characters out of time and out of step with current mores. Certainly, their function in each novel is very different; also, Carlos manages to be infuriating but also somehow sympathetic at the same time, and that makes him a much more interesting character than I had expected.

If there's any disappointment in the writing for me, there is a bit where Singer from the first book shows up as a deus ex celebrity, and it feels a bit like a distraction rather than something that added to the story. I think he could have been edited out without the story losing anything. Oddly, Cheeirilaq showing up again worked for me, possibly because we get to see it as a foil against Rilriltok and learn more about their species. Also, bug friend(s).

Ancestral Night is a snappy and grippy space adventure. The big "future idea" here is not faster than light travel or even arguably the alien artifacts from long-disappeared alien races (although these things appear in the book); it's instead that humanity has discovered "rightminding", or the ability to directly manipulate emotions and hormones such that they can get past tendencies towards hierarchy or antisocial behaviors and coexist peacefully with aliens.

Rightminding reminds me of the mood organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. However, instead of being a metaphor for the similarities of humans and androids (and also being a tiny side mention), here it's the meat of the story and gets at the line between brainwashing and merely adjusting your brain to get along better with others.

I love how talky this book is. Yeah, sure, there's stolen alien spaceships and sexy space pirates and giant ancient space squid. But also, there's constant rumination and bickering on what makes a just society, what it means to be a person, and what an individual's responsibility to their society is.

The other thing I think is done well is that nobody and nothing is perfect here. Maybe the Synarche is better than alternatives and involves a lot more consent than similar systems, but also it's built on atrocities and there's rightful criticisms you can make about what little you see. Similarly, rightminding is a useful tool, but also any tool can be misused.

Anywho, I quite enjoyed this. Fun ideas and interesting characters wrapped up in an action space story.

(A few more spoiler-y opinions in this post.)

This is the final book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and to me is the most solid of the three in a lot of ways.

My favorite part of this book is that Jase from the ship has landed and is trying to fit into the Atevi world. When the series starts, we are already past the point where Bren has trained his entire life to be the paidhi but the language and culture is entirely new to Jase. Bren tries to acculturate Jase, but they are at such a disconnect socially and emotionally for most of the book. Jase wants some "humanity" from Bren, and there's some question of "how far" Bren has mentally adopted being Atevi and doesn't express emotions or even uses Atevi phrase constructions in English. The disconnect and Jase's anger dovetails so well with Jase having his own secrets and ship politics happening off page that it's quite effective.

My second favorite part of this book is probably the development of Bren's relationship with Jago, such as it is. Despite being such an Atevi communicator, there's still a large cultural gap about what this means to Jago, and she is also not willing to fill Bren or discuss it either. It's a nice parallel to the pitfalls that Bren falls in considering Atevi as "friends" or "liking" them. I complained about this a little in my review of the first book, in that I feel like this isn't a series about gender or biology, and I am always a little disappointed when "I am having an emotional and sexual relationship with an alien" gets glossed over when there should be so many rough edges. It feels a little too human with too much unsaid and too much working too easily.

Finally, I do feel a little here that this is another book where Bren does not have much agency. His role is to try to smooth tensions, get Jase up to speed, and to negotiate complicated nuanced politics with old school Tatiseigi who hates the way humans have corrupted Atevi. In the end, Bren pushes for a fishing trip that he has promised Jase, but it turns out that even this wasn't of his own design.

This is the second book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and one where Bren gets a little bit more agency than the first, where he is mostly kept in the dark.

It's a classic Foreigner book where the bulk of the book is careful, slowly building politics--internal Atevi ones, external mainland ones with Deana Hanks the temporary paidhi, and ones from the ship with its people imminently landing--all of which come together in a satisfying action sequence. I think this book is where the first trilogy really starts going, and sets up the third book which is probably my favorite of the three. It's the book where Bren starts to realize that his loyalty is truly more towards keeping the treaty and its peace than with the institute of his own state department that technically gives him the authority to do what he is doing.

I like the tension here with Bren's fiance Barb and the increasing romantic tension between Bren and Jago. Barb is absolutely incredibly emotionally immature, both pushing Bren away because the relationship is (understandably) not working for her but also asking for him back (because her new relationship isn't working either); I think it is a little over the top but it works because it's such a contrast with Atevi mindsets.

I said this in the first book, but I feel like this entire first trilogy is one where Illisidi is an independent wild card, where she has her own agenda and politics and Bren (and the reader) can never fully depend on her support and where her loyalties will lie.

Also extremely minor, but as touchpoints for future books, we also get our first pizza party, our first trip to the Taiben hunting lodge, and our first meeting with Tabini's fiancee Damiri.