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Not a particularly long novella, but Arkady Martine pulls off jamming several genres in there. The story seems like a murder mystery at first, with the setting being a cyberpunk-esque dystopian future in a nowhere town in California desert. There are shady conspiracies. There are creepy, weird, and eccentric characters, and some of them are artificial intelligence. There is a lot of discussion of architecture. Overall, a satisfying read.

This is a fun space opera that has all the fun space opera things: giant interstellar empires; worldbuilding on various interstellar cultures, and how they interact with each other, and how they do gender; exploration of how cognition and identity works in entities that are not (or not entirely) human; grand plots and conspiracies.

The overall plot is perhaps a bit simple, and some of the characters lean perhaps too much into one-dimensional archetypes, but it does not matter that much against the lively worldbuilding, and how it ties into the whole story.

It's kind of an interesting series of books, because the whole framing is, like, as a historical document describing contemporary events... the same way you'd read a historical document today, and you might be slightly outraged by the things that the people from the time got up to, but at the same time you get an insight into how they thought, and how they were like as actual people. That kind of clashes with the ending, though, because the ending tries to tie things up, and I don't want it to try to do that.

So I have finally finished the whole Terra Ignota series, and have come to the conclusion that nearly everyone in it is awful.

This one is very much a part 2 to the first one, but it does explain a bunch of things and moves a bunch of stuff forward, while leaving a bunch of unresolved plots for the following parts.

This was an interesting book. I liked it more than I thought I would, at first. I do want to finish the series, now.

It's one of those Adrian Tchaikovsky novels that has alternatively-evolved sapient animals in it, but it also has an unexpected amount of queer characters. Tchaikovsky tends to be good at the former, and this book is not an exception; he also handles the latter well enough, though if you are not okay with bigotry exhibited by some of the more contemptible characters being part of the plot, you may want to skip this one.

The novel starts out kind of slow and takes a while to ramp up while you want to scream at the characters to figure it out already. In the middle, it may seem to be a bit predictable, although it does take some interesting twists in the last third, which subverts that impression a bit.

Overall, a fun parallel universe story, if you're into that sort of thing, even if not an exceptional one.