smartflutist661's reviews
1354 reviews

I'm waffling on this one. There were some really good parts (most of Myfanwy—Amber has given me a residual love of protagonists with memory loss), some bad parts (half the book was info dumps that went from an interesting plot device to clunky and interrupting), and some parts that just don't make sense when you think about it too hard (the plot). Overall it was quite a lot of fun, though. Reminiscent of the Laundry Files.

Mostly this was just boring. I almost gave up on it multiple times in the first half, and if I had realized earlier that Atlas Paradox had like 6 points of view I probably would have. Once

Lan died

it became a bit more interesting, with

Hilo having to take on a role he is very not suited for

. The ending saved it from being a straight 3 star, since I love a good

"I'm not ready for this terrible power"

plotline.

Magical grad students who are terrible people backstabbing and infighting. Much like book 1. Somehow there was even less plot? It was less clear that this book actually intended to say anything or go anywhere. Still, fun if you like watching terrible people do terrible things to each other.

This book accomplished exactly what it set out to do. None of it was new, but it was put together in a way that I'm not sure I've seen before. It was funny, there were cute cats, bitchy dolphins, some potshots at tech bro culture... just a great romp through "villainy".

There was a masterpiece buried in this book somewhere. I hate rating these kinds of books, because I'm torn between "look how much better this could have been" and "eh, this was pretty good already." In the end this ended up being just another YA dystopia, hitting basically the same beats as Sanderson's Skyward but without the redeeming qualities of M-bot or

actually dealing with the world-ending threat

, which was by far my biggest problem with the book. On the plus side, this did help me realize what makes a book feel YA to me, which is basically a young, naïve, brainwashed protagonist in a cult-like environment, i.e. where there is a (likely mysterious) Government ruling their entire world, which is either the only world we know about as readers or the only "safe" place in a wider world that is only talked about in hushed whispers. See The Giver, Hunger Games, Divergent, etc.

As for my issues with this book...

There's an extremely obvious solution to the problems of both timelines we experience: send Kyr back to the orbital defense platform again, where she kills Jole and jumps the planet-buster away. As soon as that's accomplished, Wisdom destroys itself. It seems extremely likely that the fascist Terran empire falls apart without Jole and the broken Wisdom. What's that? You're afraid Earth will just develop its own Wisdom? a) it took millennia for the Wisdom to develop into a godlike reality-manipulator, and a lot can change in millennia; b) sorry, you don't get to genocide a planet because you're afraid they're going to become fascist overlords, who as far as I could tell weren't actually committing any genocide themselves until Jole was driven over the edge. (Not that genocide-less fascism is ok, but it's better than fascism-less genocide, at least in my and many authors' opinions, being that there are whole genres about this out there.) Still don't like that solution? Time is literally not a problem. Spend a few decades Groundhog Day-ing scenarios where you push different levers just right until you find a future without immediate fascism or genocide, then Wisdom destroys itself. (It's impossible to solve all the problems of the past and future, but both of those are immediate and relatively straightforward.) You want to highlight the value of cross-cultural understanding and cooperation? Yiso and Kyr work together to do this, crafting a future where there's a chance at happiness for everyone.

Which brings me to the next part of my rant... Val's timeline was so much more interesting than Kyr's, and in the end it felt like Jole's genocide was just to have an excuse to put Kyr back in the box of Gaea, where, great, she saves everyone in the cult (totally unrealistic, by the way), but hardly thinks about the wider world at all, beyond wanting to save Chrysothemis from Jole (this part, possibly realistic—hard to break out of a small perspective when it's all you've ever known). I've seen the suggestion to alternate Val and Kyr perspectives instead of having them linear, which already would have made the cult timeline much more interesting.

Overall, disappointing for a Hugo nominee, not as good as Greenhollow (but also very different), fine for what it was.

I sympathize with Elma, but I understand Nicole. And I'm a sucker for a good mystery/sabotage/spy plot, especially in space. And you know it's good when all of the characters and the reader all have the same information and are coming to the same conclusions, without any of the annoying "let's withhold this information from these people for no other reason than to create some conflict." I also got the impression this book wasn't necessarily planned, and was impressed by the weaving together of the known events from The Fated Sky.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Basically Bishop's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

A bit better than the first two (not that they were bad). The Tryad were an extremely interesting race, and Lee's struggle was different enough from Bishop's typical character development that it kept my interest. No pure evil point of view was also a nice changes of pace.

For probably obvious reasons, this strongly reminded me of Spinning Silver. I loved the feel of a story told by the fire on a long, cold winter's night, as well as the glimpse into the conflict between traditional Russian folklore and the Eastern Orthodox Church and a period of Russian history rarely addressed. Plus Morozko, like the Unseelie of the Dresden Files, scratches that "power unfathomable by mortals that sometimes looks a lot like evil" itch. Will definitely be continuing.