Reviews and Comments

Yet another Ian McDonald book is a 5-star read for me, even though it is something I normally wouldn't enjoy. McDonald has a knack for writing books that are everything I normally hate (slow uneven pacing, not much happening, way too much time spent describing the background and scenery, etc.) but I end up loving. This wasn't quite as good as Hopeland, but still an excellent read.

This was quite similar to A Memory Called Empire, but with a lot more physical action and a protagonist who wasn't enamored with the empire she was pulled into. As a first novel it is a little rough around the edges, and there could have been more support for some of the motivations, but it was still enjoyable. Another positive - If you are striking out when trying to explain microaggressions to someone who just doesn't get it, have them read this book.

I started this last night and so far it has a political setup reminiscent of A Memory Called Empire. This book is the winner of the 2024 Compton Crook Award.

Hench is a lot more serious and deep than you'd expect from some of the flippant descriptions. I went in wanting something as light escapism. That's not what I got, but it was certainly worth a read, and I liked it far more than a few other things I've picked up recently that looked better on the surface.

This book was pleasant enough, but it lost all of its momentum before it ran out of pages, so the ending just felt weak. I was personally at a place that I wasn't wanting a very challenging read, and this worked very nicely.

This book is filled with sorrow and loss, but also hope. The two books of this series are beautiful. The detailed worldbuilding meshes well with the sibling series, but is separate enough to be fresh and new. Künsken lovingly handles issues of gender identity, poverty, and the crimes people commit for survival, sometimes with a gentle caress and sometimes with a fist to the face. He explores how governments react to those self-preserving crimes, and also how the governed may deal with their intuitions. There is a lot of hard SF here too. Near-future science on a vivid and believable Venus drive the story.

I tend not to like prequels, so even though I enjoyed Künsken's Quantum Evolution series, I put off reading this for too long. As I mentioned in a previous comment, I went into this confident that I knew the book I would be getting, but ended up being completely wrong. The book explored several concepts I wasn't expecting from this writer, most notably a gender identity story, and did it so deftly that it appeared effortless. The pacing of the book was deliberate and slow, but Künsken painted such a wonderful picture of the society and the people in it that it was nice to linger for a while. There are many pages devoted to the the physics of Venus, both in the clouds and on the surface, and I imagine that some readers may get impatient, but I found them creative and interesting. This is one of my two most favorite reads from 2023 and I'm eager to get into the next volume.