smartflutist661's reviews
1354 reviews

Living out my dream in books. And doing it with 1960s technology. The alternate history is impressively convincing. The science is terrible (differential pressure gauges should show 0 if two hatches have the same pressure on both sides; the moon's gravity is 1/6 Earth's, not 1/16). Luckily this has effectively zero impact on the story, which is more about how this crew navigates all the tensions of the 50s and 60s, plus both a recent and incipient catastrophe. I hope we get to see plenty more of this timeline.

I wanted to like this more (though didn't necessarily expect to), but in the end it was just good. Didn't connect hardly at all with Daevabad, which is what I was expecting. The two halves of the book were very different, but I enjoyed them roughly equally (though the back half started to drag a bit). The crew shines when they're together, so the fact that they're not together much is part of the problem. Enough promise that I might pick up the sequels, though.

Just when you think you're completely over "oh no, not Destiny..." stories.... It helps that Morgon wasn't a whiny little shit about it, just stupidly stubborn. I was initially very confused by the "riddles," because they're... not? They're just Jeopardy questions? But this doesn't detract from the story at all, and the story was interesting enough with enough mystery (and moved quickly enough) to keep me going. I've got the omnibus edition, definitely intrigued enough to continue.