lkedzie's reviews
311 reviews

This is not a time management book. This is philosophical treatise. This is a good thing.

When a book promises a shocking twist in its subtitle, I give you one guess as to what I will feel about the twist.

I picked this book up in terms of its appeal to my prurient interest, and the twist was immediately obvious, so much so that it was distracting from that and any other interest. Arguably, the secondary twist is better, or at least better executed. But while this is thriller and not mystery, part of the joy of mystery is the clues, the hints and false hints that allow you as the reader to be able, in theory, to get to the truth before the detective, or at least look back on events in a new and unique light. That is largely absent in the book, which makes large parts of it a slog to get through. It's more that that has to be the twist.

But the ending is sufficiently deranged, and it's impressive how a strong ending can redeem an tepid read.

This is one of those books that is best if you do not know what to expect. It starts when a man wakes up without memory on a spaceship. So if you like tabula rasa scenarios and science fiction, this is a recommend.

What I liked the most is that the core plot is a reconstructed trope, taking a well established sci-fi story and looking at it through a hard science fiction glass. And that is what I do not like about it as well, specifically that as science fiction goes, there are parts here that are too hard SF for me, or too interested in the technical bits, so there are segments about descriptions of physics or biology that I glazed over until the next character beat.

Good book, but maybe not for me.

This book has all the elements of something that I should love. #$*(&, this book has all the elements of something that I should write. It's a paean to urbanism. It represents cosmic horror through gentrification. It's a meta-critique of Lovecraft and his fans.

But at its core, this is a superhero movie. Maybe that's a very NYC thing in and of itself, being functionally their birthplace. But the quippiness, the grandiosity, the scale, the fights, the origin stories; it feels like something that belongs in its own cinematic universe. I can see the value in that, a little cynically, from an anti-racist perspective. But it drains a lot of the literary quality from it, because it ceases to be a response to Lovecraft and becomes more of a harumph about Lovecraft.

Maybe if you like Marvel, you'd like this.

It's like the Upper Peninsula's The Road Warrior with pollen as opposed to petrol.

There's not enough soft collapse fiction, tales of dystopia or post-apocalypse where the end is not dramatic, and what's often the worst part in reading is the Black Mirror feeling of everyone accepting things as commonplace and regular. There are examples like Parable of the Sower, but I feel the sub-genre lacks the psychic real estate that it should hold.

The Last Beekeeper is a good example of it, and frequently does excellent work by how downplayed it keeps the end of the world - the casualness of one character's mentioning that the 4th Amendment has been revoked as part of a side plot nails the vibe of a destroyed world and is as chilling as any of the spookums. The downside is that the there's a lot of needless exposition that doesn't serve the world building, and overall, I'd rate the prose style is poor, but the latter I'd rate as common for thrillers and not something I mind. The science is okay, again sort of par for the course in the genre.

The plot is solid, though, and the characterization excellent. Or maybe not excellent, but the author takes pains to show empathy for everyone in the story, including villains (with one exception, which feels cut for time as much as anything) and minor characters, so even if not realistic, all feel realized. That last point lets it stand above a lot of other thrillers.

Sadly, though, the ending is stupid, breaking the novel's own logic to set up a sequel. I mean, I like that

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there is the father-daughter tension as one of the driving points of the novel, and I can appreciate the way that you can't kill her off because there's otherwise no place where a redemption can arise from,

but could we not do this through the protagonist dealing with some other character's problems, rather than an entirely open "to be continued?"

I assume that everyone is going to say it's Harry Potter and the Nightmare that is Colonialism, but I think that Terry Pratchett is a better point of reference. There are a lot of similarities. Kuang uses footnotes with the same gleeful abandon as Pratchett. The authorial voice has the same cool anger and impeccable righteousness. Magic primarily substituting technology in a 1:1 fashion is the same in the books. Even the setting as a commentary on the superciliousness of academics is the same.

I'm not writing that Kuang knocked off Pratchett, or even that she's read him. I am asserting that this book puts her in the running to be his heir in the literary space he occupied.

Babel is about children made into Oxford academics who are fundamental to the working of magic in the world via their understanding of languages, and their slow movement from finding school a place of respite in a world that doesn't like them, to become disillusioned. I have heard others complain about its pace, but I think that is part of its brilliance. The speed of the plot reflects the characters' internal lives, and languorous, vivid, engrossing descriptions of their academic careers, as the boil ticks up in temperature, punctured by moments of absolute chaos that fly by and give that real sense of fear at what's happening.

If you are looking for high magic, this is not your book. The magic is so subdued that it almost could be written without it. But, again, I like this. I particularly like how it does a good job at mirroring actual colonial projects in its perpetual need to expand to maintain the same effects. To quibble, I think that there is discussion about how the thesis here is for linguistic relativity, but that is a minefield in a swamp.

Kuang is a divisive author politically, in my impression more on the left than on the right. I think though that her history is unimpeachable, again why it's almost a shame to shelve it in fantasy, and even if you want to dispute the conclusions therein you need to heed the facts like she does. I think the only political misstep in the book is

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the Letty POV chapter. It does not feel like an explanation. It does not even feel like a rationalization. It does not provide new information, at least that which could not be inferred, and it does not create empathy for her, not like some of the other POVs. The problem is what was needed for her, wasn't needed for the book in general, and would have taken away from everything that was going on. Or she needed a backstory that would provide more convincing reasoning,

but this is functionally very minor.

The thing that impressed me the most about this was how easy a read it was. Look, I read a lot, but even I am like 'ugh, how many pages?' when I look at a book like this, and sometimes have to make a point to parcel things out systemically in order to keep at it. Babel was smooth all the way through. About the only thing was at one point where I looked at the book and found myself thinking "what else is going to happen in all this page count?" Things are going to blow up, that's what. Its length may be what keeps it from a 5 star from me. It's close, damn close, but that relaxed pacing of it taking its time to tell its story, which works to support the narrative, also makes it hard to re-read, or even to suggest it to others to read.

It's Clerks meets Jurassic Park.

No, wait, stop, that's a better idea than this book. But it has that feeling.

This book is part of a series. There's nothing on the dustjacket to suggest that, but it's really not relevant for the book, except a 4th wall joke in the book about the protagonist writing all the books. Notably, the book has on its cover monsters that do not appear in the book. I will not be reading the other books.

The plot is in the Lost World vein (Doyle, not Crichton). A paleontologist is called out by a tech billionaire to advise on a fossil exhibit, shows up on the wrong day, and ends up trapped with others on a nearby island where dinosaurs still roam. Only it's not dinosaurs (I think that was another book in the series) but ancient reptiles.

What saves the book is its broad comedy. The protagonist is the comic relief, to the point of Holy Fool status. This is brilliant. It means that the competent characters in the thriller can be killed off as the plot needs them to, and it makes the protagonist's acts of competence thrilling because they are kind of a shulb so it feels more extraordinary for them to accomplish anything, plus the author is not beyond making their trivial successes minor.

The death count is high. The author has some weird hangups? I think. There's a lot of quirky characters, and some, I think, are intended as Take Thats. They are oversized, and make some real choice choices. I will note in its favor that I think it avoids transparent racism in its indigenous characters.

I am tempted to give the three or even four star review, because a different way is to judge the book on its own intentions and say that it's perfect schlock, a literary B movie, that knows exactly what it is and wants to give it to you in as efficient a package as possible, and while the comedy isn't always...er...funny, keeping it in that zone is at least a star, but if you want something like this, you best be looking at lower ratings anyway.

It's Primer, as if made in 2022.

What if Silicon Valley, as we know of it today in all its Big Tech awfulness, invented time travel?

If that interests you, stop, and go read it. Like a lot of time travel stories, the surprise and novelty are part of the fun. I am writing this to you from your future that, even with the relatively low stars that you will give it as a book, its premise is so golden that it does not matter.

Parris knows what makes a good time travel story, and has a lot of fun playing with the rules, but has an equal amount of fun having the characters play with the rules and what the implications are. The book has a solid non-twist ending (or rather

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there's something that I think is intended as a gut punch that just...isn't, or if it's not, maybe consider some of your life's choices?

). Parris also has a distinctive staccato style and fresh sense of pace to his prose that's probably going to turn off some but that I thought was fun.

The glaring problem is that the stakes get too high. Like I think that

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the shift into eldritch-style horror

is clever, but it feels overall less like it was a planned progression and more like the author growing bored of the premise. Or if it was a planned progression, I feel betrayed, more like a bait and switch, the book becoming about its framing device as a lead in to an overly generic sci-fi romp rather than an amusingly satirical send up of US culture.

It feels a bit like I am judging the book for not being as smart as it could be, but the book was that smart at the start. And I think this is first published novel, so it is a promising start, but unfortunately future me didn't talk about what else comes out.

It's what if the

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"Playback"

episode of season two of NBC's Stingray happened on the Titanic.

The standout aspect is the imagery. There's some great visuals in this, from both a horror and a science fiction perspective. It wins some sort of tell don't show Raspberry Award for the repeated rehashing of the protagonist's history, and the fact the romance plot vanishes at one point suggests its importance. But the hook is catchy and you can dance to it. The cliché is thick, the twists are predictable but competently executed, and the villain is admirably evil.

I don't like "Hark! A Vagrant," or rather I don't know H!AV, but it is the sort of work that people assume that I like, which irritates me. The drawing style frustrates me, in that I know it is hard work to get something that looks that loosely drawn, and the humor is a one-joke variation on a Monty Python sketch. But I picked this up on the strength of Beaton's interviews. Plus, I have an interest in stories of the culture that develops around industrial sites. and what they're like. There's certainly a leg of my alternate history where I ended up double majored in anthropology and gender studies and did work on the fracking boom.

Ducks is accomplished but too diffuse. Well, yes, it is Beacon's memoir, why should it be otherwise? That's life. Diffuse. And as memoir, it is excellent. It is an important, maybe even rare, story to tell, full of moments. But the medium of the comic does not add anything to it, particularly in Beacon's meticulously loosey style. The message gets lost with the volume of the material. That so, I bet that there's already a film adaptation in the works.