Distress is another really enjoyable book by Greg Egan, part of his very loosely connected Subjective Cosmology trilogy. It's less "weird" than the other two parts, and might make a better starting point for interested readers. We accompany our protagonist, a scientific journalist, to a phyics conference on an anarchist island – less happens than in th other books, but that just finally leaves room for better characters and characterisations. The whole book, especially its increasingly twisty story arch, is very recommendable scifi.
Wild Seed (first part of Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series) was good, but not great. She experiments with the implication of mortal and immortal characters, who definitely aren't gods, and while I enjoyed the premise, and the writing, and the characters immensely, I felt that the story meandered a bit and didn't quite know where to go. It was still a very pleasant read, and I'm looking forward to see in which direction the series develops. (After finishing the book, I was told that I had started the series in the chronological order, not the published order, which was not at all my intention, and may contribute to my impression of a vague plot.)
Uprooted by Naomi Novik was a perfect fantasy story/fairytale. It's got all the right parts (dark magic, regular magic, unimpressed heroine, ambivalent wizard, etc), but isn't terribly predictable, and forms real characters instead of shadows of well-known archetypes. By following the easy-to-like first-person narrator Agnieszka, and seeing her relate to the Dragon, her best friend Kasia, and all the others, painted a vivid and realistic picture of the world. We even get a surprising amount of moral ambivalence, considering the genre. A very good book. I may start to read Naomi Novik's fantasy series if Uprooted is any indicator for that series' quality.
This was terrific. We get Locke, Jean, and Sabetha, their backstory (Scott pulls off the old past-present alternating chapters well), and a contest with unfair rules and unfairer outcome. I loved how, again, Scott makes clear that the women in the story (mostly Sabetha, but not only) have agency, and character. No matter if they choose to fuck people or not, their choices are shown to be theirs and valid, and men who don't respect that are shown to be assholes. It's great.
The Scar is the second volume of Chine Miéville's Bas-Lag series, and it's as impressive as the first one. Only very loosely connected, we now explore the wider Bas-Lag world instead of New Crobuzon. Again, China Miéville excells with implicit worldbuilding, forcing the reader to think along and ahead (though there's less culture shock included than in Perdido Street Station).
I enjoyed that I was most of the time not cheering for the protagonist and her view of the world, and did not like her particularly, without hating her either. All characters were very morally ambiguous, nearly none just likeable. Same for the story – there was never a clear-cut villain, or a predictable course (for example: not all of the likeable characters got simply killed off). As I spend most of my reviews arguing for exactly this – morally ambiguous characters, implicit and clever worldbuilding, no Good v Evil – I was very pleased with this book. At no time it felt like something groundbreaking, but it definitely is a very good book, and I'm looking forward to the final work in the trilogy.
Crispin's Model is modern Lovecraftian horror – well done, but I'm not into Lovecraftian horror all that much, and not into painting either, so it didn't grip me.
Excellent scifi. Cibola Burn is the fourth part of The Expanse, and the series just keeps on giving. Every book is exactly the kind of scifi I want to read – difficult situations, new worlds, people who are consistent and neither good nor evil (except for Naomi, of course), but just live their lives. Cibola Burn felt very much like I'd fear the exploration of thousands of suddenly appearing new worlds would go. I think if you think too hard about the technology level displayed in the series, some missing (AI, among other things) tech doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I'm willing to forgive this for the vast, technologically and psycologically sound universe.
Dune Messiah was very much not my kind of book, and for different reasons than I disliked Dune. While my criticism regarding Good vs Evil characters from the first volume isn't relevant to the second one, Frank Herbert's narration style of showing the thoughts of just about everybody felt like a giant "tell, don't show". I felt like the story just crawled along. Everything was overthought and overexplained, none of the characters were likeable in any way, and very little actually happened. I felt that the large time gap ("I don't want to be the messiah and cause a jihad" - 12 years later, guess what) took also part in my disbelief at the fact that there was nothing an emperor could do to at least mitigate the issues he suffered from. Ehh, I probably won't go on with the series.
The Stormlight Archive looks like it's going to be outstanding Fantasy – Brandon Sanderson starts out with a nearly flawless first volume with The Way of Kings. We get a fascinating, complex world, with slow, steady, and subtle worldbuilding (except for a bit of on-the-nose "I'm explaining the rules here" in the first five pages). This world has a lot of distinct cultures, with histories, and mythologies (partly connected, partly separate), and we get to figure it out mostly for ourselves! The story is fairly unpredictable (at least for more than a hundred pages at a time or so), the characters are distinct, mostly lovable or at least understandable, and not Mary Sue-ish at all. One of the protagonists has to deal with explicit depressive episodes, for example. It's a long book, but it's very much worth it, and while at times characters seem like Fantasy archetypes (is that Ned Stark? Is that Hermione?) – that never lasts long, and instead they evolve to be distinct characters that I can't wait to read more about.
Codex Alera continues to be stunning Fantasy – I'm honestly not sure how this Jim Butcher is the same who wrote the Dresden Files. Those are good, but nowhere near Codex Alera. In the second to last volume, we see a great mix of character development, new characters, characters with legitimate but opposing views, and of course brilliant last minute tactics. All characters we care about get a fair bit of development, and since nearly all characters are very very nuanced, including the deeper introduction of non-human cultures, I'm more than willing to accept the one or two plain villains. Seeing an end-of-the-world level struggle on all sides of the three plots (Amara and Bernard, Isana with the frost people, Tavi on an entirely different continent) was a good mix, even though I felt the chapter endings/POV switches were not always executed at good points.
I'm pretty sad this series is over soon now, especially since I'm not one for re-reads (I'd love to, but in the same time I could read new books!) So I hope the last volume, First Lord's Fury, will be an appropriately awesome ending.
Wooop! Sci-Fi version of Hunger Games with real characters (a bit Mary Sue-ish, but still fun). Also, touches of Brave New World in terms of castes.
Golden Son was a worthy successor to Red Rising. It, too, had a slow start, only here te start extends to the 50% mark of the book. After that, a fairly slow and generic story picks up speed, originality, and its past characteristics. Even at its best though it still feels forced in a way that's hard to describe: As if everything happened just because the author willed it that way, and may as well have happened completely differently without breaking any internal logic. The wooden language doesn't help either. I felt there was a lot of unfulfilled potential in this book, and I'm not sure if I'm going to continue the series.
The Secret Life of Bots is an utterly charming novella by Suzanne Palmer. I can't really say much without spoiling parts of it, but the protagonist is lovely without being humanised, the personal dynamics are sweet and witty, and the time reading it was very well spent.
The Will to Battle is currently the last volume of Ada Palmer's brilliant Terra Ignota series. One volume is missing, and it's supposed to come out next year, and I bloody hope so because this one leaves me aching for more. As with the previous books, I completely get why people would not like this book, at least its style, but to me it's magical. Even three books into the series, we get an astounding amount of worldbuilding, we receive new information on the previous books (in particular their creation, it's all Very Meta), all the while the world heads straight towards the biggest and worst World War imaginable. I love these books dearly, and the world Ada Palmer shows us is filled with wonders.