storyorc's reviews
643 reviews

Not yet convinced that heroism and conflict are as massively overvalued (and, implicitly, male) as this essay suggests but grateful for being asked to reconsider something I have always taken as gospel. Excited to look further into the carrier bag theory of evolution that inspired this essay too. A shame Le Guin is no longer alive or giving talks at such we could go ask questions about it!

There is a sick delight in reading something that actually manages to express the depths of how disgusting it can feel to wear a human body: "I feel like a food waste bag dripping its rotten soup." One of many visceral descriptions. The typography tricks are a great way to echo the melting human form too.

Mumu, the grotesque alien predator, is absurdly relatable - the perpetual battle to 'disarm' the body so it behaves, pride in hard-earned tips and tricks for presenting feminine, even just the slow torture of existing on a subway each day. It was brave of Min to put this out here so nakedly.
 
The ending is

inevitable and heart-rendering

but also came at the right moment for the novella not to overstay its welcome. 

Enchanting setting. The detail woven into this world is so vibrant and alive. I want to read more here!

That said, the characters lack agency and the ending favours setting up the next book so much it feels more like the first 80% of a great book than a great book on its own. 

Only Serapio truly feels like a main character. The rest of the POVs are unfortunately quite inconsequential. I adore the Teek ways and it was cool to see the military college but neither Okoa nor Xiala (my fave) added much that Serapio couldn't have. With Naranpa you're just waiting and waiting for her to realise how serious her situation is but when she finally takes initiative once, I was flabbergasted to see her

return to the tower after the Maw to just wait to die

! Perhaps Roanhorse could have bit the bullet and given that half of the story to Abah

as a villain point of view with a dramatic ending

. Or omitted it and let Okoa be the eyes in Tova, thrown back in the world of cults and politics after his mother's warning. Hell, he could even be adopted from the Maw to preserve Naranpa's most interesting feature. And the history with Iktan.

I grew attached to Xiala and Serapio. Their emotional beats made up for a pretty simple plot. Xiala is fierce and independent like the protagonist of Roanhorse's earlier book, Trial of Lightning, but much less angsty (to be fair, she is older). 

The writing in general is a step up for the author in my opinion, with many lovely/wise turns of phrase (shockingly often from Xiala). The opening chapter is as tight as could be, absolutely mouth-watering. Hooks your curiosity and your heart in one fell swoop. I hope Saatya gets a prequel! 

I will probably read the sequel if it's a duology (i.e. ending guaranteed) though I resent feeling forced to by this book's lack of ending. There is much else to enjoy besides the ending. Most of all, however, I hope Roanhorse releases another book in this world surrounding different events. The world feels deep enough to support several.

Before I criticise, let it be known that I have spent hours pacing and muttering about The Locked Tomb series. Muir consistently makes such violently lovable characters that close to 800 pages of frustration across two books has not made me any less desperate to find out what they do to each other next. It's just a question of how long we have to wait to get to 'next'.

Nona is the swift return of everything I was relieved to be done with by the end of Harrow. Nona somehow understands and does even less! Muir excels at creating the impression of depth and mystery by having her in-the-know characters banter about secrets and events centuries old but at some point it starts to feel like listening to a radio play in a language you dropped after school. And Nona didn't even get to blindly enact a creative murder plan with

soup

. Any time she starts doing something interesting, -

tearing through Blood of Eden, arguing with a Resurrection Beast

- she blacks out and we screech to a halt for the next Jod confessional.

If you enjoy slice-of-life and have the patience to just go with the flow as you read, you will adore this book and I envy that. I, however, got to learn that it is possible to comprehend an audiobook at more than x2 speed. Here are a list of things that I believe could have been cut/condensed:

If these were the Hobbit movies, I'd be looking for the fan cut that makes Harrow & Nona into one film*. That said, Nona's old identity reveal, and the final sentence, had me jumping out of the chair. I'm cautiously optimistic that we have survived the mysteries and in for an operatic treat of an ending. To anyone about to DNF, you do not want to miss the last 20 or so pages (50 if you love the Sixth). Jump there if you have to.

Can't end without shouting out the star newcomer, Pyrrah Dve and the continued heartbreaking excellent of whatever the hell Camilla and Palamedes have going there. I can't even think about them for too long without going a little insane.
 
*My pitch for this cut, brought to you by the aforementioned pacing and muttering:
 
 

1. Tomb opens at the end of Gideon. Alecto's body emerges - soulless, because Harrow woke the soul  (that presence she unhelpfully calls The Body) as a child and took it with her to the Mithreaum. This is Nona! Camilla picks her up while delivering Gideon's body or something, idk, I never understood how they got picked up by BOE after Canaan House either.

2. Strip out Harrow's fake memory chapters. Instead have the novel alternate between the traumatic ruins of Harrow & Gideon's lyctorhood and Palamedes & Camilla fighting to achieve Greater Lysis, as seen through Nona's eyes. (Would require some shifts like hiding Nona while Harrow helps with Palamedes' skull, and maybe saving Kiriona for the final book. Hard to say without Alecto.)

3. When Mercymorn stabs Harrow, that's the end of her narration for the book. Her little fake-memory bubble universe becomes the (short - for real this time) prologue to Alecto so that we can end up with all the same players back in the game for the finalé.

Most interesting was that Ellison managed to make me feel sorry for the torture machine by the end too. He writes "the machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before". Horrific, to think that with AI, we have as much opportunity to create new levels of suffering as of ease. 

Extremely visceral descriptions of pain, fear, awfulness too. Incredible how much of an impression of unending torment it conveys despite being a half-hour read at most.

Lumpsucker is slow to start, left me with mixed feelings on the final act, and strays farther to the telling side of the showing-telling balance than my tastes run (especially with the switching to reported speech during critical conversations).

Ok, now that's out of the way, holy shit, you guys. What a gem.

The world is zany and packed with irony but in that darkly comedic way you try not to laugh when you learn the creator of the Segway died from Segway-and-cliff-related injuries. It's stressful to read such a believable, close dystopia. People, companies, and market forces feel like the same old bullshit from real life, carried to their natural conclusions of the extinction industry premise. Everyone is fucking everyone over (including themselves) all the time, in such intricate, systematic ways that satisfying justice is a fairytale. And yet - relief of reliefs - while it is a clear critique of capitalism, it never feels smug or lecture-like. Rather: yikes, look at what we're doing.

The characters take getting used to yet I was shocked how attached I was by the end. Especially to Halyard, the dick. The author demonstrates surgical precision in letting them be as unappealing as they need to be to display the extinction industry and the a bleak moral conclusion respectively while still injecting enough redeeming aspects to make you root for them. This cure takes different forms too; Halyard gets humanised through his love of food and his sister while Resaint ingratiates herself with the reader via her general competency and being the only person in the room willing to reckon with our ecological devastation.

The humour actually works? It's rare a book makes me laugh out loud but it felt like every chapter had a giggle. 

Even scenery descriptions come furnished with apt but out-there comparisons that make you smile, only occasionally coming across a little self-satisfied. It goes beyond wit and one-liners too; the absurdist humour is not only woven into many plot points (e.g. Resaint's reason for interest in the lumpsuckers), but a load-bearing pillar of the grin-and-bear-it doom that pervades every page.
 
The themes would be nigh untenable without such excellent world, characters, and humour to ease the despair. If you've ever felt the tug of a "Black Hole" moral quandary, this exploration of a rational mind "not being able to get over a particular fact" will grip on an existential level. There is respite, if not absolution, in the multiple valid criticisms Halyard throws up against Resaint's reasoning, though some get lost in the plot. Still plenty of fodder to jumpstart debates with friends.

PS - If anyone figured out where Halyard is meant to be from, let me know! My theories of English and America were shattered as the fates of those nations became clear.

Heartfelt, imaginative, and zany, this book is someone's next favourite wild ride, just not mine.  Fun action too. Very cinematic writing style.

I started skimming at the 50% mark due to the lack of narrative focus. I appreciate that the author cares enough to humanise each evil ex but all of them getting POV chapters and constant flashbacks slowed the story too much for me. I would have preferred hints about them through behaviour and dialogue (and fewer of them).

The further along the book gets, the more it feels like the author is fighting a losing battle against how much more interesting the Hayward family is. Castro especially is fucked up in a very entertaining way. The two 'main' characters were shockingly irrelevant to the climax (anti-climax?) and by the end I was dreaming of a version of this story centering the Haywards and Oaklands: Gossip Girl with demons.

My copy had a few self-publishing format quirks like overlarge tabs, a special font showing up as ?s and an inexplicable link to a Wikipedia entry but nothing that detracted from the story. I suggest less epithets next book though; "the CEO" was particularly jarring.

Pulling weapons out of tattoos is SICK tho, 5/5 stars for that.

Gifty did not deserve the events in her childhood that lead to the plot of this book, but nor is she one of those Christlike heroes who survive their hardships with beautiful, tragic resilience and unfaltering love for their fellow man. I'm not even sure whether what didn't kill Gifty made her stronger or just harder. Her unpretty growth around it makes her infinitely more real, however. Crazy, to call a neuroscientist relatable, but her ugly parts feel like I could have grown them myself. It's a very intimate book. I can only imagine that must compound for readers who share more of her background.

The ending felt rushed to me, though I am not unhappy with the destination. Perhaps it just needs time to settle.

While the trilogy never quite recaptured the highs of Ancillary Justice, Mercy is a strong return to form after Sword's plodding middle. It winds down with a good balance of tense action scenes and philosophical/political maneuvering. Most of all, the world of the Radch remains committed to 1) destroying the tired sci-fi trope of one planet = one culture and 2) interrogating how we admit or deny the personhood of someone alien to our culture.

Breq is challenged more (though not as much as in Justice), emotionally, physically and mentally , while retaining her nurturing yet curt core. Unlike many fictional leaders, you see how she inspires loyalty with her relentless pursuit of compassion. She has never met a little guy she won't stand up for. And yet she conducts herself so strictly that you also cannot blame those around her for failing to understand her so often, and drawing so much on her generosity and support.

I have never seen an author explore how a hyper-attuned, hyper-capable AI would end up playing mother to the people in its charge. Stories like WALL-E also have humanity growing soft from coddling, yes, but Leckie's ships and stations must love their crew in silent ways that hide this fact behind a militant face. One of the strangest things to swallow in this book is how it feels half sci-fi political thriller and half slice-of-life from a kindergarten teacher. Officers (not just the young ones either, looking at you, Seivarden) require constant handling and medicating so that they play well with others and don't throw tantrums. On the one hand, showing that Seivarden still struggles to overcome her lifetime of aristocratic arrogance adds realism, but the unfortunate cost is that she remains mostly a liability. Her high point in my mind was definitely the heroics at the end of Sword.

While I continue to be unreasonably fond of Breq and Seivarden, my main delight in Mercy was the variety of new not-quite-humans drawn in to explore the quesiton of personhood. After Translator Dlique's abrupt end in Sword, I had marked Leckie's Translator-specific novel 'to read' because she was so clearly operating on a set of wildly different, fascinating set of morals, so I was thrilled when a new translator appeared. Sphene was another standout, both in concept and its acerbic wit, despite not really

having any bearing on the plot

. The inclusion of Sword-class ships, particularly Atagaris, with how Breq handled it in Sword, whose loyalties were in question were nail-biting tests of Breq's policy of

freeing the AIs

. I only wish they'd pushed the question further with Mercy of Kalr during that pivotal event, seeing as how its mere suggestion of being its own captain in the first pages provided the kindling for said policy.

Or by having a ship actually ally with the enemy, or decide it didn't want its inhabitants, or even just showing Breq losing the struggle with her principles when she let Tisarwat control the Sword of Gurat. Also, Sphene deserved to kill that Anaander Mianaai.

I can't not mention the pacing oddities either. The first quarter felt like the true ending of Sword, the middle felt like action leading into a climax, and the action in the beginning of the last quarter felt like it was gearing up to climactic, only to quiet down into very little on-page. 

Leckie should be praised for refusing to hand-hold  her readers (except perhaps a touch of preachiness on endings in the final chapter). However, here and there, she and her editors may have suffered from that over-familiarity with the text which blinds you to when you are not giving readers enough information. Conversations in this series are always dense and understated thanks to the Radchaai worship of propriety, but on a couple key occasions, I was left wanting. There is one talk between Breq, Mercy of Kalr, and Seivarden which I could tell was emotionally poignant but not exactly how, and I was also unclear on the mechanics of a treaty that proved crucial later.

I would love to read a series of short stories following Breq and the Mercy of Kalr (or watch them on TV). Like her crew, I couldn't help but grow comfortable spending time with her, even when the story was slow. Shout out to the lovely worldbuilding details tucked in that let me feel smart for noticing, like how so much of the ship naming conventions have to do with Radchaai gods.