Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City 
3.0 Stars
8-13-2021
Kind of a mess. The basic idea is that a cynical engineer sets up a bunch of Home Alone type traps to defend a city under siege. Or put another way, it is a _The Martian_ type outing where a super clever engineer and his crew come up with all sorts technical work-arounds that no one has ever thought of before in order to put off death for another day.
This seems like a fine premise for a book, and it kind of works? But it also runs up against a number of long standing KJ Parkerisms. He wants to be super deep into the details and mechanisms of his medieval world, but at the same time he just murders the consistency of his world building on a regular basis. E.g. one of the absolutely key plot points is that there is a navy that wants to relieve the siege, but it can't. Why not? Because there is a difficult shoal that the navy has to go through, and the enemy controls the light house that is supposed to guide ships through the shoals. By pointing its light on the path. Through the shoals. And reading stuff like that it's just like, wow, dude, do you have any fucking idea how a light house works? How did you make it to 60 years of age without learning what a lighthouse does? They are there to orient ships at night. During the day, you don't need them, and at absolute worst you can send some small craft through the reefs to measure the depth and then lead the heavy ships through. So, yeah. There are a number of bits in the book where reading them will just ruin your whole day with how stupid the world building is. Which is a problem! Since as mentioned above, the book is all about this world building, and then also trying to be cynical in this world.
Despite these major flaws, and a few smaller mis-steps, the book does a least have a dynamism from its premise and can work well when it is not absolutely shoving some dumb bit in your face. It's a fun scenario to think about, it's enjoyable to see the cunning & low-class supply sergeant run rings around people, it's fun to see imperial toffs and barbaric invaders outwitted. Etc. etc. The more cynical musings about the world/race/etc don't really work, but, eh? Oh and I can't ever imagine reading this if you are a woman. Finally, kudos to the audio book reader for making the bold choice to say his lines really, really slowly. There were a number of points where I was like "uh, is the mp3 player broken?" but nope it was just an extended dramatic pause. It was a surprisingly nice change and added some unearned gravitas to the book.
(Book #2 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
A Memory Called Empire
3.5 Stars
8-5-2021
"Like a microwaved orchid, this book is sticky and hot" - singer/poet One Direction
So, right away this book has 2 red flags: First it is focused on a sci-fi empire that is based off the Mayans/Aztecs, and second it purports to say important stuff about empires and colonialism. I've been burned by both of these traits on multiple occasions. Oh right, another flag, its plot did not necessarily make a lot of sense/have much meat to it (e.g. one reading of the book is that she is a diplomat, she gets a message from home, she decodes the message with the help of a tech, she transmits the message, fin). Also the book can't seem to make up its mind about what is saying about empires? Also some of the technical/strategic bits didn't entirely hold together.
Despite the flags though, I enjoyed this outing and came away liking the book. This was helped by the book not taking itself too seriously or getting too deep into its technical world building. E.g. there might be a space warship, but how is it powered? what does it fire? how many other ships are with it? the author is completely uninterested in any questions like these. Instead she puts her efforts into colors, clothes, plazas, flowers, food, scents, senses, memories, and people. It works well. I liked basically all of the characters, and I liked the over the top romanticism and sensory descriptions of their world. And because of that affection I could blithely ignore the sentences that were trying to be more serious, most of the poetry, and all of the above mentioned red flags. One sci-fi element that did work well was the imago, a personality recording device that the protagonist's culture uses to record and transmit knowledge down the generations. It's a fun device to bring out the flavor of characters and add a second layer of resonance to much of the story, since the main character's imago is basically investigating their own death, and the main character has an inherited layer of memory and emotion already built up around most of the other characters.
HeartStrikers, books 1 & 2
2.5 Stars
7-30-2021
"Your strategy was so bad that it confused me" - random Starcraft player after I defeated him, ~2014
An odd but not entirely terrible series of books. They're sort of like YA versions of the Dresden novels, with tense situations and magic and adventure and a tiny bit of romance and a lot of dragons. The plotline is that ~50 years ago magic returned to the world, and with it all sorts of supernatural things have woken up from hibernation, including several hundred dragons. The main character is the youngest of these dragons, but he has been raised on too much modern human media and doesn't want to be a sociopathic asshole like the rest of his dragon family, and so he has Spirited Away type challenges and adventures where it turns out being nice to various supernatural entities wasn't quite as bad of a choice as his family is telling him. The books are not great, but there are charming bits and creative bits & they are competently written. There's a couple of beats that are drawn out too long/repeated too often, but it's still a cut above just generic dreck.
The books are oddly structured though in that very quickly they introduce the idea of Seers, characters who can directly see the future and sift through the likely outcomes of people's actions. There are exactly 3 Seers at any point in time (I like this), but they exert an enormous control over events, since they can manipulate events and lives through both short and long term plots. E.g. any direct struggle against a Seer is 100% doomed, since their pawns will be gifted with extraordinary good luck, while their opponents will just slip on banana peel after banana peel. And you can't really run from Seers, since they can just look ahead to where you will go and then meet you there. So real freedom of action only exists in the boundaries between Seers, where their plots are clashing against each other. And this is a really weird thing to introduce into your book from the very start, the idea that the character's actions are mostly blessed/doomed from the start and have been specifically engineered to have the outcomes that they do. It makes the whole exercise seem even more meaningless than usual? And the author isn't really doing anything meta with the idea, e.g. the idea of Seers as stand-ins for the author or some such. Which brings us back to the main character, who has been specifically chosen by one of the Seers, precisely because the main character's decision making is so bad and unlikely that he can introduce an element of chaos & disrupt another Seer's carefully laid plots. So on the one hand the book is saying that "go ahead, be kind, remove that thorn from the lion's paw and he will reward you later" and on the other hand the book is saying that "the only reason this behavior is working is that a thousand year old dragon-Seer has manipulated events to make being nice work out, otherwise you would be dead". Anyway! It's just an odd conceit to structure your otherwise quite standard adventure books around, the sort of conflicting reality-shaping fields exercised by these three Seers, and where and how characters can act to possibly go against this flow.
There's 3 more books in the series, and I probabbbbbly won't read them, since they're a tad too slow and overwritten for the content they have.
(Book #1 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
The Little Stranger
3.0 Stars
6-30-2021
Betrayal! Sarah Waters and I have a deal: she writes slow, beautiful, lesbian romances, and I give her 4 and 5 star reviews. This book though? Zero lesbians. *Zero*.
Instead, I get an ultra-slow burn ghost story set in a British mansion. On the one hand, I like that Waters taps into a under-used vein of horror, that of home ownership and watching this enormously valuable asset crumble around you as it is continually assaulted by heat, cold, rain, snow, winds, accident, plant growth, leaks, mold, etc. etc. It is scary and nerve wrenching stuff. Things become doubly parlous when you are dealing with the famously shoddy and drafty British construction standards. Besides the plus of house-based horror, I also simply enjoy Water's writing. I think she's a charming writer, even when she is just meandering through scenes of people talking and carrying out their daily lives. She also has a real skill at painting people and environments with acuity, making rooms and architecture and gardens perfectly clear, and capturing the shifts in mood and conversation. At the best her characters feel concrete. Like there is no airiness or artifice to them, and Waters is just directly transmitting the lived experience of interacting with them.
On the other hand ... the book has structural problems in that her chosen sub-genre and plot simply do not fit the page count. 500 pages is too long of a run time for a relatively sedate ghost story. The massive page count saps any real tension or terror from the book. Things are not helped by the protagonist being the nicest of nice guys, and as he is the only PoV character, you spend the entire, long, novel in his head. The final dozen pages of the book do have an excellent pay off, and it does kind of make you want to read the entire novel again, but as with most Waters this desire is balanced against the largish length of the book.
Free Will
1.0 Stars
6-15-2021
There was an online discussion about free will, and then on the same day I saw this book at the library and picked it up. Synchronicity? No, Mistake!
There is this phenomena where, for some reason, the published writing about free will is in terribly bad. Pick up a random book or essay on the topic and odds are it will be ass. I think the reason for this is that people who get the correct answer on this subject only need to write a few sentences, while people that aren't able to grapple with the idea need to write endless epicycles in order to try and make their ideas not so obviously wrong. The end result is sort of an extreme Sturgeon's Law, where the only people writing about the topic are the people who don't really engage with it, and just continually slip back into dualism in their attempts to think about the topic. That is what happens with this book: the author continually, implicitly assumes that there is some thing that is making decisions besides the brain. Anyway, obviously, DNF, I just thought the more general phenomena was interesting.
Blood on the Stars, Book 1 & 2 & 3
1.5 Stars
5-15-2021
Some extremely thin gruel, and yet this is all that I actually require from a mil-sci-fi-series on audio book. It is not good. But it is just barely sufficient to listen to while doing yard work, as opposed to it's failure of a younger brother, 2034. I haven't forgotten you 2034. The author of this series understands the low bar that he has to clear, and he churns out reams of just-barely above GPT3 writing for an endless series of novels.
Minor note 1: "duty" sounds progressively more funny the more times it is said out loud.
Minor note 2: the book is bad-middle-manager focused, with an endlessly repeated beat where the engineers say that it will take 6T amount of time, and the ship-manager demands that they get it done in 2T or 3T amount of time. You can only assume that the first several months of engineering training is how to instinctively and immediately pad your estimates by 300% in order to deal with this bullshit. There's another bad-management beat where officers are always saying "I can feel my tactical attention slipping! Doctor, inject me with more vials of meth, stat!"
Minor note 3: There is another similar, terrible series, and in that series the author uses the phrase "a chink in the armor" precisely once per book. This author does the same thing? I'm not sure if this is because of similar upbringing, a sort of convergent evolution of bad-mil-sci-fi authors, or if the phrase is an intentional nod of the head, or if (more likely) there is a demon successively possessing these authors and forcing them to write these novels and in each novel the demon leaves its characteristic spoor.
Minor note 4: ok, I will say one good thing. The author chose to make this a legacy game, with the events taking place amongst the ruins and dead planets of a much larger and more advanced previous empire. This is a good choice, since whenever you need a new tech or McGuffin or whatever, it can just come out from the ruins.
Northern Spy
3.0 Stars
5-8-2021
An important PSA about why you shouldn't become an agent for an intelligence service. All downside, only the promise of an upside, you are the one taking all the risks and hanging out on a limb. It's like the adage about a poker table; if you look around the table and don't see the sucker then you are it.
The story was competent enough and it also brought in some unusual elements (motherhood and childcare), but overall it was not my cup of tea.
Demon Princess Magical Chaos
5.0 Stars
5-1-2021
Amazing. Iconic. An Artistic masterpiece. Kim Stanley Robinson, *this* is how you write a novel.
Ministry for the Future, KSR, audio book
2.0 Stars
5-1-2021
We will sustainably power the world by hooking a generator up to KSR's handwaving
(Book #3 of my "Spring" into the Apocalypse reading list.)
There's a lot to be said about this book, but for the most part other people have said it better elsewhere (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3500748849?book_show_action=true. I will just contribute a few more bits of snark, e.g. this book reminded me most strongly of the ending of Brazil, where the protagonist is inventing an increasingly fantastical and farcical rescue plotline in order to disassociate himself from the experience of being tortured to death. (spoilers). Ministry starts off slightly realistic, but becomes increasily absurdist as the story goes on. I've read LitRPGs where the hero gains 999 levels and defeats God which were more grounded.
That concludes the main body of the review. As a final note, I would just like to say that this book and its characters are annoying as fuck to listen to. It dug up long repressed memories, of being cornered by some Rice big-brain and being talked at about math while feeling the life-force palpably drain from my body. The book is both too intelligent and not intelligent enough. On the one hand, because of the author's enlarged brain, he fails to understand the many true things that a dumb person would implicitly understand. On the other hand, the author is not smart enough to offer any useful ways forward that other people haven't thought of before. Normally I would give this experience 1 star, but since the issue is of immense global importance I am spotting the book an additional, *full* 1 star, in the hope that this book at least sparks useful thoughts from some other person.
Level 7
4.0 Stars
4-23-2021
- Item 1 on checklist: Do not die
(Book #2 of my "Spring" into the Apocalypse reading list.)
A little bit Dr Strangelove, a little bit Fallout, and a little bit Threads, told in a succinct, simple, and effective style. Also the novel is ~100 pages long, which I think is a great length for a novel and something that many more writers should emulate. The author wrote this early enough (1958) that it precedes most nuclear-apocalypse fiction, and it seems like this book would have been ground breaking at the time (even if it is mostly forgotten today). It still holds up well, and while the basic ideas are now common the story still works and it doesn't cheaply use the dire events of the book. Put another way, I'd much rather read this than most of the 2021 Hugo nominees.
The Expanse, audiobooks 7 & 8
4.0 Stars
4-20-2021
Decent quality, and there is so much of it. All of the Expanse novels have the same essential plot: some assholes attempt to use alien artifacts to become the new lords of humanity, the protagonists try to stop them, 600 pages of events ensue. These books continue with that same story structure, though this time the assholes are moderately more successful than usual. I liked it? I liked that the authors aged everyone up by 30 years, I liked that they allowed more fragility and change in the story, and I liked that the stories for the most part keep an essentially humanist tone. This isn't quite Iain Banks, but the books do mostly side with people's desire to follow their own desires and paths over any sort of universal systematizing or patriotism or empire building. The adventures that go on are fine, the plotting is fine, the world building is fine. I liked the sense of dislocation but also possibility that the story produces, that the universe is no longer Earth, Mars, and the Belt and their old rivalries, but rather dozens of new worlds with growing millions. I also liked the Laconians, the new assholes from this book, in that the author did a great job of making them so dislikeable. These latter Expanse novels are a definite step up, and the authors are becoming better and more confident story tellers and also benefiting from all the previous work that they've put into their world.
2034
1.0 Stars
4-1-2021
(Book #1 of my "Spring" into the Apocalypse reading list.)
Really dumb, really bad. I had heard some noise that this was a fun book, sort of an updated Red Storm Rising, but: A) a few decades of left-wing reading have completely ruined these stories for me, e.g. there's a part early on in the book about a fighter pilot and his ultimate peak joy of flying a combat aircraft and my continual response is a sort of "oh great, I'm so glad we could spend $500 million of our tax dollars getting you off rather than having health care", and then B) it's not even that competent? Like, having some mustache twirling Communist villains and some stout hearted American vets and and techno-combat shit should not be that hard to write, but this author team fails to do so in anything but the most basic fashion. When I have the reaction that "I could probably write something this good..." you know you've fucked up.
Stopped after a couple of chapters, would not recommend.
In the Dream House
2.0 Stars
3-12-2021
The beatings will continue until the writing improves
An uneven book that has occasional excellent chapters. The conceit of the book is that each of its ~200 chapters is told in a different style, as the narrator (Maria) outlines her relationship with an attractive but emotionally abusive girlfriend. The book has been in the news recently, since a local school board had complaints about a few of the sex scenes, leading to the book being removed from the high school reading list. This is a shame, since A) there are only a few prurient chapters, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to just excise that 2% of the book while leaving the artistic message basically untouched, and B) young people are really the best audience for the book, since they're the ones who need a primer on avoiding these sorts of red flags. The narrator is recounting events from her early 20's, and how an unhappy Maria let herself get too wrapped up in a more conventionally pretty and credentialed & exciting lady, which in turn led to Maria not dumping the girlfriend when she turned mean. There's plenty of other things going on in the book, thoughts about sexism, thoughts about patriarchy, thoughts about how these are translated into same sex relationships, etc. etc. It's not all bad: some of it is powerful, and some of it is intelligent. Too many of the chapters though come across as someone who has been through an MFA program and hasn't found their own voice yet, e.g. it is trying to be poetic or affecting but comes across more as trite and in a boringly familiar way. I would like to read the author 10 years from now, when she has more practice and confidence and is more involved in creating her own fiction rather than recounting things that happened to her. I would also to like to read the abusive-ex's memoir? Like maybe Maria snored when she slept or something, I feel like we might not have the complete story.
The Expanse, audiobooks 1 & 2 & 3
3.0 Stars
3-10-2021
Satisfactory and extremely long. Years ago, I liked the first Expanse book that I read, but I did not think it was anything too great & so I decided to not read any more of these door-stopper novels. Then the TV series came out, and year by year my affection for the series and its characters gradually increased. And so when it came time to queue up some new audio books, I decided to listen to these next. As above, they are consistently OK. The real star of the books is the world building, for which the best adjective I can come up with is "solid". The books are set a few centuries in the future as humans have colonized the solar system, and they don't really rely on any extraordinary new technology. The one conceit is that people have discovered an extremely low-fuel drive which allows them to perform low G burns basically indefinitely. With this efficient drive, Mars is a few days away, while Jupiter and the like are a matter of weeks or months. Other than that change the author sticks to technology that is entirely within our current trajectory and does not require any great leaps. (if anything this is a bit unrealistic, since you would expect changes in AI/bio-tech to significantly upend things. However does make the rest of the reasoning easier if you assume these techs make incremental rather than revolutionary developments.) So despite taking place in space, the series feels very grounded, as basically everything that occurs in space would be understandable by an ISS veteran or the like. And the author does a ton of exploration of what it would mean to live and work in space when you don't have Star Trek levels of technology. E.g: gravity is a big deal; it's intelligently worked into how the ships are designed, it changes how people look and develop & their cultures, it affects everything about life on board a ship depending the ship is at 0G, .3G, 1G, or 5G, or 15G. The authors try to think about all the little things in life, like the sound of the hand-vac that you use to clean up the blood spheres that form after an accident in 0G, the plants and filters needed for life support, the difficulty of developing genuine food growth and eco-system webs outside of earth & the logistical and strategic implications thereof, etc etc. There's just a ton of work done by the authors to present reasonable and interesting solar-politics and strategy and logistics and culture and bio-systems. It's not genius stuff like Banks would make, and there are holes if you decide to poke too hard at it, but despite those minor quibbles The Expanse is the most well-realized version of the 2300's that I've seen.
Now for the downsides. The audio-book narrator is not doing these books any favors. He is for the most part very calm and neutral, when he should be doing emotions and silly voices. The books themselves are also too long. For the third book, the TV series just flat dropped the events from the last third of the story, and they were 100% correct to do so. Like the book's editor could have just excised 200 pages from the middle of the story and things would have been fine, nobody would have been disappointed. (*Edit*: wait, no, on re-watch the TV series *did* have these episodes, but I had skipped them in the TV show as well as the book since they were so un-needed & then scrubbed them from my memory. My bad!) There's also some weird narrative clunkiness and what I can only describe as plot elongation, where the chain of events and logic in the first book is stretched to absurd lengths (TENET syndrome). This sort of stuff only makes sense if the narrative was assembled from the emergent randomness of an RPG group rather than being designed and plotted out beforehand by a writer.
The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
5.0 Stars
3-1-2021
My favorite Waters so far, and the first one I think where it consistently crosses the line from fan-fiction+++ over to genuine art. There are some standard Water's elements: an extremely strong sense of place, where the day-to-day tasks and costs of living are constantly reinforced. She would make a great GM, as she is continually mentioning the details of how people work, prepare food, live, travel, etc. etc. It might be ~10% excessive, but still it is a positive and characteristic part of her work. It helps that much of the story is set in London during the Blitz, which while terrible also created a lot of gothic beauty. There's also the standard Water's structural creativity; this time the structure is that there is a social graph, and the story covers a a segment of time for that social graph in 3 different periods. The first part of the story is set in 1947, then the second part in 1944, and then a final segment in 1941. It works surprisingly well, and acts as a sort of in media res that is both initially interesting and also resolves itself into meaningful connections. You can "see" the people and objects in front of you, but you do not know their full history and meaning, and so you are constantly thinking about and unraveling that history until the story arcs start to connect and complete. It also helps that each of the three segments of the book is about half the size of the previous segment, so that story elements resolve steadily more quickly as things go along. A final Water's touch: while the story as a whole is what you might call happy, there are also parts of it that are suuuuuper dark.
Other notes: this is the most modern setting of any of her books that I have read, which I think helped me connect with it. Also, bi-communists! They're coming to steal your women and your men.
American War, Omar El Akkad
1.0 Stars
2-20-2021
A competently written book, however it it is focused on themes that I'm not particularly interested in & it has poor world building/is not really concerned with the consistency of its world. The basic idea is that the book explores the current violence, imperial and otherwise, in the Middle East through the lens of a Civil War in the America of 2074. So you have civil war, terrorism, insurgency and counter-insurgency, religious violence, refugee camps, meddling foreign powers, all those fun elements. However, enough of the technology & world building & material circumstance fell flat that I wasn't able to suspend disbelief & become really invested in his story (civil war in 2074? Really? That's optimistic. Also the civil war is over restrictions on carbon use, which I feel like will be mostly resolved one way or another by then). In the absence of a world and plot and characters that I was invested in, the writing/ideas weren't good enough to pull me along Anyway, the book wasn't particularly enjoyable or moving or well written & it did not teach me anything, so I can't recommend it.
The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters
4.0 Stars
2-15-2021
An excellent book, and with just a few adjustments I think Sarah Waters could produce a truly great novel. Waters already does several things well; her writing is measured but of high quality, she does an excellent job of creating a sense of place and the rythms of life in a different time, and her lesbian romances are +++. All she really needs to do is jazz things up a bit. For instance, rather than setting the book in that worst of all islands, Britain, could she instead set it in space? Or maybe a wizarding boarding school/college? Could one of the characters be a dragon, or maybe a star-ship AI? With just a few small changes like this she could earn the coveted "5 star" rating for her next book.
Oh right, the plot. After WWI, downwardly mobile British lesbians find each other, slow romance, and due to economic anxiety they turn to Sweeney-Todding the guests at their rental house, selling off the items and assets of the murdered guests in order to make ends meet while trying to hide the murders from the police, a Mom, and a nosily investigative neighbor. It is a story as old as time.
The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson
3.0 Stars
2-10-2021
Raisins are Nature's candy
A well written PSA about the importance of not murdering people. The writing was excellent; brief and elegant in many of the conversations, more descriptive and evocative in many of the actions. As usual with crime-stories though I couldn't entirely vibe with the novel. The protagonist is unsympathetic, his actions are wasteful & dumb, and ultimately you wonder about the point of the novel. Hmm, what else to say. It reminded me a little bit of Despair, if it was conceived and written by Dashiell Hammett rather than Nabokov. It made me miss more joyful & creative narrators, like the serial killer from The Wasp Factory.
The Daughter of Time
2.0 Stars
1-15-2021
All Dragoons are Bastards
According to the NYTimes, this is one of the best mystery novels of all times. The NYTimes is incorrect. This book was written in 1950 by an English lady, and while the writing is often skillful and occasionally enjoyable the larger effect is ruined by the somewhat arbitrary story telling and the author's right-wing politics. The basic plot is that a policeman is laid up with a back injury, and with the help of his friends he does historical research into the murders supposedly perpetrated by Richard III. This diverges from the usual formula for mysteries (events happen, are actively investigated & chased and decoded), and instead what you get is a more straightforward affair where the characters come out with one historical account after another that mostly supports the case they are making. So it's not really that earlier information is investigated or recontextualised in any clever way, instead the logic & textual trail mostly just leads them where they want to go. This runs into a problem that the crew of Buffy talked about in their commentary on the show, namely that many of their plot points come up during investigations in the library, and so how do you make that interesting to the viewer? Do you have yet another scene of two talking heads, or yet another scene where everyone is sitting together around a table in the library? The Buffy writers made a continual effort to keep these scenes interesting. The author here runs into the same problem but does not tackle it with as much success. There are numerous mini-scenes where the author tries to add some juice in between the text-dumps, but these scenes often come across as forced and boring and self-congratulatory. You can quickly see the scaffolding behind the story.
There are other issues; my own view of the times and location is owned by Mantel's Wolf Hall series, which seems more astute and enjoyable and colorful. It also makes the central mystery of this book (why were these murders ascribed to Richard III?) very simple (because Richard III's family was no longer in power, and because one of the new ruling nobles could have you whipped to death if you disagreed with their version of history). It's not a complicated equation, but this book takes 200 pages to lay it out for us. Another problem is that this book tries to take 1950's English mores, and apply them to 1590's English times. I'm not having it. Another problem is at such a historical distance, it seems a fool's errand to try and make really fine-grained judgments about people and their character, and I don't have a ton of patience for books that do this. If you want to use historical figures as templates with which to tell your own story, ok, but any effort to really nail down the nature of a person at such a remove seems impossible. One final and extremely minor quibble was that yes, the author gives the standard wisdom that faces have a bottomless & fascinating amount of detail and information in them, and yes as such portraiture is one of the most difficult and higher arts. I'd differ from her though in that she expects the face of a judge to be that of a good & humane person. Murdochian canon agrees with the first two points, but disagrees on the third, and would generally expect a judge to become self-important and narrow-minded through the habit of standing above others in judgment.
The Dragon's Nine Sons
1.0 Stars
12-4-2020
I liked the title!
And that concludes the complements section of this review. The book is an alt-history semi-sci-fi, where the year is 2050 and a Chinese Empire and an Aztec Empire have a cold war on earth and a hot war on Mars. The characters are various soldiers from the Chinese Empire, chosen for their expendability, who are sent on a suicide mission/heist to infiltrate and explode an asteroid base that the Aztecs are using as a staging ground for their fleet.
So, a couple of things right off the bat. The alt-world building is terribly lazy, e.g. take a few nations and some dumb stereotypes and bam, you've got your world. I checked the publishing date on this book rather early in the reading, expecting something in the 80's or 90's, but nope! It's from 2008, when writers really should know better than this. The characters follow the same pattern: there's a hot blooded gun slinger from Texas, there's a big dumb muscle man, there's a skilled sword fighter from Japan... and so on. They manage to be both tropey and unrealistic, while also not being very exciting or weird. The rest of the world building is similarly dumb, like people are shipping cattle to Mars, and sending minerals back from Mars. There aren't any special minerals on Mars! Mars is a long way away! This doesn't make any sense! The writing is serviceable, i.e. it is not fan-ficton level, but it is also clunky and joyless. The actual plot of the story rises to that same standard. Ok, back to the world building. The author seems to be writing this as anti-Aztec propaganda, e.g. in his word-cloud for describing them the word "blood-thirsty" is right there in 72 pt font. But as alt-history Noam Chomsky writes, the Aztec empire never colonized the Chinese, they never took over the world or tried to set off any nuclear bombs in anyone else's asteroid base. So who's the real villains here, hmmmmmm? For their part, the Chinese protagonists are part of a highly authoritarian, militarized, and stratified society, where despite having space ships most of the people are doing scutt work and gambling over rations of wine and completely lacking in roses. I feel like if you're going to live in an evil empire it should at least be a flamboyantly evil empire, with bright feathers and obsidian and leopard skins stapled to everything, as opposed to the boring Chinese evil empire where most people are downtrodden peasants and the secret police just shoots you in the middle of the night. Also in the Aztec's favor, I liked how their military appeared to operate via a version of The Secret, where their strategy maps were more like vision boards of what they wanted to actualize into reality.
Anyway! This book was one of the refugees from the Houston flood, which accounts for why I had it to hand, and I mostly read it in a waiting room while waiting. I don't feel cheated exactly? But I can't think of any circumstance in which I would recommend the book to anyone.
Oh and spoiler, what the book really should have been about was the life story of one of the Mar colonists, who grew up on a hydroponics farm there. How cool would that be, to spend your life among lush plants just a pane away from the (almost) vacuum of Mars.