third_bookworm's reviews
110 reviews

I don't think anything can live up to Middlegame, but I did love this one. Very fun spins on assorted mythologies, and quite a bit of time for beloved returning characters. As always, it is a delight to see Roger and Dodger from others' perspectives.

WAY SADDER THAN I EXPECTED

Ran out of time on my library loan + spend enough time reading for school/work that it's very hard to motivate myself to read nonfiction recreationally

I don't even know where to start with this book. Or this series. 

Things I liked: genuinely very interesting and engaging theological/philosophical reflections. Analogs to Greek mythology that were fun sometimes (and infuriating at other times...).

Things I did not like: 
Throughout the series, but especially apparent in this book because it had to wrap up the series, it seemed that Palmer's interest in characters and ideas and plotlines varied wildly, and so she picked up and dropped them more or less at random. Several plotlines introduced in the first book were resolved here after barely being engaged with for the middle two books, and the resolution... Fell flat, to say the least. There was at least one interesting philosophical debate introduced in the first book that was "resolved" in this book by a monologue by one character about how it is no longer a societal issue and an explanation by another character that it will be solved by the government doing research on the issue. 
Similarly, there was a real lack of consistency for several side characters, which had some degree of in-world explanation but really felt like Palmer had decided these characters were either more or less interesting than she had initially planned in the first book, and engaged with them much more or much less sympathetically for no apparent reason. 
A lack of plot consistency was justified by saying that the first book had been censored in-world, which was technically set up in the first book but was never engaged with in the second or third books and in this book felt like a justification to add or contradict things with no setup. 
Overall, this book felt inconsistent with any poorly connected to the previous books in the series, which is not what you want for the concluding installment of a tetralogy. Each book in the series has itself been fairly bizarre, all over the place, and incoherent, but this one was really above and beyond for that. Palmer is an ambitious writer, but does not seem to actually have the technical writing skill to pull off the project she has set up in these books.

And despite the fact that I have a long laundry list of things I disliked and that I think were poorly executed, and that I can't list many things that I actually did like about the books, I think I enjoyed them. Or, maybe "enjoy" is the wrong word; they were fascinating. Compelling, but not for the reasons I think they were meant to be. I would not reread them, I can't even genuinely recommend them to anyone else, but I'm glad I read them and I will be thinking about them for a long time.

The show tricked me into thinking I had misremembered and should give these books another shot. Unfortunately it was even worse than I remembered from the first time through. Additionally I cannot stand Rand and the whole book being narrated from his perspective was deeply irritating.

Not long enough for the emotional buildup to be convincing

The politics of this hit a bit closer to home than I was expecting or was totally comfortable with. It's an intense read for an election year in the US. But otherwise I enjoyed it, mostly. At a few points the character motivations were kind of baffling; I didn't really get what Cyril was trying to do for most of the book on a day-to-day level even though his book-scale goals made sense. I definitely plan to finish the rest of the series, but I need a break before reading the next book.

I have read this book before but it is so much better than I remember. Either it had a much more substantial effect on my taste in fiction than I realized or it's just catnip for my tastes in particular. Court politics from the perspective of a protagonist who is a genuinely kind, endearing, optimistic person; vaguely fantasy steampunk ish setting; background implications of complex cultural significance of tea; detailed descriptions of architecture and clothing; significant plot points about infrastructure and engineering; detailed and nuanced takes on arranged marriages... The list goes on. Very much looking forward to rereading again in the future.

This was a slog, and not really what I had been hoping for from it. I think it would have benefitted significantly from a more aggressive editor (the extremely long chapter on the history of putting satellites into space was... less than riveting, to say the least). However, I think the main problems I had with it are that I am not the target audience (it was geared at a general audience; I was hoping for a detailed analysis from someone in the field written for others in astrophysics, and instead I got wave-particle duality explained to me like a high schooler.) and that I find Tyson aggravating as a person, so any time his personality or politics showed through in the writing it annoyed me. It wasn't what I hoped for, but I think that's more on me for the expectations I went into it with. 

For all that, there were some genuinely interesting and insightful pieces scattered in.

Also, fairly depressing implications for the ethics of a career in astrophysics.

Just didn't get into it