Reviews and Comments

This is in the same universe as The Space Between Worlds, but the main characters from that book purportedly only make limited appearances, which is disappointing to me. I was drawn to the characters in that book far more than the world. #SFFBookClub

I'm a little under halfway and have encountered a couple things I wasn't expecting. First, it is radically different from its sibling series, The Quantum Evolution. Second, there is a gender identity story here and it is being told extremely well up to this point. Any time I think I understand Derek Künsken he shows me how wrong I am.

This will probably be the unpopular minority opinion, but here goes...

This book was still enjoyable, but the first half was extremely slow. It picked up once we got into the action, but it was somewhat more subtle this time around. There is nothing wrong with the book, but it feels like Wells thinks she needs to do more to evolve this character, but doesn't really know what, so we just get tiny bits.

I loved everything about this book. It is inspiring and hopeful. The "found family" aspects are wonderful, without being so overwhelmingly positive as to render them completely unbelievable.

Now that I'm through gushing, I will say that many people will not like this book. It has many aspects that I typically despise in books, starting with the fact that not a whole lot actually happens despite the immense length of this tome. (Someone who recommended it to me described it as "a massive slab of a book.") At one third of the way into this I still had no real idea what it was about, and even by the end it is difficult to concisely describe. Is it possible to say I highly recommend this, while also warning that a great many folks will not be happy with it? Despite it ticking a lot of the boxes that usually make a book unlikeable for me, I felt good while reading this, which overrode all the analytics of what I generally like an dislike.

This is incredibly imaginative, but sometime maybe too smart for its own good. There are parts that don't make a lot of sense and are occasionally a slog to get through, but they all weave together by the end. There is a lot of insightful commentary on the current state of social media, and this was published before Musk took over Twitter. This is likely to be one of the 6 novels I nominate for the 2023 Hugo (assuming nominations ever open).

As always, Annalee Newitz is astoundingly smart. She fills this book with many interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the story she writes around the ideas in this book is a little weak. The most notable example is in the first section where two factions have little reason to trust each other, yet they do so in only a couple pages.

Terraformers is still worth reading for the concepts, but Newitz's previous two works of fiction are easily superior.

There's no real way to state why I didn't like this book as much as its predecessors without spoiling nearly the entire thing. Suffice to say, the tone of this book is inconsistent with the rest of the series.

This book is far less about helpful tips for actually doing the cleaning, and more about giving yourself permission not to be perfect. I cleared that hurdle long ago. I am sure there are many people who will gain a lot from this book, but I wasn't one of them.