ergative's reviews
1041 reviews

Exactly the same as the previous books, although I must say I'm finding the catty infighting between Rione and Desjani very tiresome. If Campbell wanted tension between them, the fleet/politician divide would be absolutely fine, but he's trying ot make it related to their various sexual/romantic links, which is just silly. Rione and Geary called it off ages ago, before Geary and Desjani even acknowledged their feelings to themselves, so Desjani has no reason to feel threatened; and since Rione called it off and insists she never had any real feelings for Geary, she has no reason to be catty to Desjani. Campbell has been really good on gender throughout this series; it's really disappointing to see him fall into the trope of 'women's conflicts must be about romantic rivalries', especially when the romantic rivalry is dumb and unworthy of their otherwise adult, responsible characters; and a different, much better source of tension is so easily available.

There was a LOT of plot in this book, and most of it was very entertaining, but I think the ending rather betrays what made everything leading up to it so entertaining. If you've spent a whole book making friends with a pair of extremely industrious grifters, the happy ending is not for them to find a way to go straight, because you like them for the cons.

wut? I'm baffled

Wow, this was trying to do the same thing that The Cold Equations did, except the purported moral dilemma was such a stupid, stupid, stupid non-issue that instead it comes across as 'should we genocide a planet? Y/Y?'

1. If the colonisation plan governed by this almighty revered 'constitution' has literally written into it, 'Oh, in the case that the genetically engineered colonists start speciating away from humans such that interbreeding is no longer possible, kill them all,' then the moral agonies being portrayed in this book about whether to kill the colonists actually were adopted into official policy decades ago. What the hell kind of science project says, 'oh, yeah, we'll genetically engineer you, but in the event we don't like how you breed, you're doomed'? Like, and the entire planet agreed to that? What the actual fucking hell?

2. The reasoning behind this eradication order is equally stupid. It's couched in terms of 'if the colonists become a new species and so are now biologically non-human, they will necessarily need to be considered a greater threat to earth than if they are humans. We know this because humans do genocide all the time on other humans.' Um, yes, they do--so if humans are maximum genocide risks, how is that risk increased by details of reproduction? Like, colonists kind of have a habit of rising up and fighting against the ruling nation once they reach a certain degree of self-sufficiency. This is going to happen regardless of speciation!

3. And then once our main scientist guy genocides the planet, we're expected to feel bad for him because his long lost love is like, 'you monster you genocided a planet we'll never be together now'. As if that's poignant? Fuck you, main scientist guy, you're guilty of genocide, so I really don't give a fucking fuck about your literary pretensions to anguished thwarted love.

Fuck everything about this book, and if you thought this book was worthy of a Hugo nomination, that means you thought that the pro-genocide argument had some merit in it, so fuck you too.

Finally! Get Geary and co into a situation where they are thoroughly outnumbered and allow them to be spanked for once. Also, I do rather like their reaction to evidence that the hypernet gate network is behaving unpredictably. Could it possibly be because in the last book they destroyed part of it? Nope! Aliens must've done it! I highly approve of this reasoning in my space opera.

Beautiful. Perfect. Just gorgeous. If you're going to do a take on a fairy tale, this is how to do it.

I liked this better than Into The Riverlands, but not as much as the first two in this series. The problem is that the first two books in this series established an absolutely brilliant narrative structure, in which the frame narrative is very unobtrusive, such that Chih's role is to elicit and witness the embedded narrative, which is really the primary tale of the story. But in this book, we're going on a journey with Chih themself, and I wasn't interested in that. The best parts of the book were the events surrounded Cleric Thien's memorial, in which Chih serves their fundamental role (as I see it): to enable other people to tell a story. And I really enjoyed how the stories told about Thien served to enrich Chih's understanding of who this beloved mentor was. 

The very very best bit was the ambiguity surrounding the story of Thien's wife, and whether her life-changing injury was Thien's action, or simply an accident. Given that the whole vibe of the Singing Hills monastery is to preserve the past through collecting stories, the fact that there is this unknowable part of Thien, whose uncertainties can never be resolved, works beautifully to highlight the difference between living people and static history.

And then Vo decides to answer the question and tell us what happened, which just breaks the whole point! Strategic error. The ambiguity was what made the book work. 

I've noticed that Martha Wells' non-murderbot fantasy books tend to skew heavy on plot and backstory, sometimes almost to the detriment of the overall effect. In this case, there was no 'almost' about it. There were so many characters that I had absolutely no emotional connection to any of them, which was fine because the wordcount had to be split so thinly that none of them had any real character arc anyway. There was so much plot squeezed into the two timelines of narrative that it leaked out the sides of what could be contained in the book. The main antagonist in the present-day timeline wasn't even present! He was just referred to in discussions about the court politics conspiracy that he was undoubtedly engaged in, and the final climax of the conspiracy shenanigans ended up happening off page anyway: 'oh, I took care of that five years ago when I did [thing] in preparation for this exact moment.' So after trying to figure out in good faith what was going on; who were the political actors in this whole kerfuffle; and why they were taking the acts that they took as the plot unfolded, I was slapped in the face with 'yeah, none of that actually mattered; there were no stakes at stake because the stakeholders all made their decisions five years ago!' Argh!

Also, what did the title even mean? Our main character is a demon, not a witch, and he's not a king but a Fourth Prince. Like, wut? I dunno, maybe it will be clarified in the sequels, but this book is the one with this title. Anyway, I don't care, and I won't read them.

Ah, excellent--I'm so glad to come across a terrific book after a string of duds. This one is very, very eerie at the beginning, almost more like horror than YA fantasy, but once you get your feet under you things become much less disturbing. The plot is a masterpiece of intricate interconnecting pieces. Bravo, bravo, bravo.

Hmmph. It was well written to be sure, but the SF components of the plot were very overlooked, sidelined in favour of the character journey. And the ending, which is just Battlestar Galactica, didn't explian anything .