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Dee ๐Ÿ“– (book aspect) Locked account

Dee@books.underscore.world

Joined 2ย years, 1ย month ago

Hello I'm @Dee@fedi.underscore.world. I run this instance, and I'm currently its only user.

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Dee ๐Ÿ“– (book aspect)'s books

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Ancillary Justice (EBook, 2013, Orbit) 4 stars

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing โ€ฆ

Cool space opera

4 stars

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It's kind of an interesting series of books, because the whole framing is, like, as a historical document describing contemporary events... the same way you'd read a historical document today, and you might be slightly outraged by the things that the people from the time got up to, but at the same time you get an insight into how they thought,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.

"The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are โ€ฆ

Content warning general Terra Ignota series spoilers

Doors of Eden (2020, Orbit) 3 stars

This really parallels my universes

3 stars

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.

All Systems Red (EBook, 2017, Tor.com) 4 stars

All Systems Red is a 2017 science fiction novella by American author Martha Wells. The โ€ฆ

Go Murderbot

4 stars

From the plot alone, this novella would be a bit of perhaps cliche science fiction. What makes it both unique and compelling is that the story being told from the perspective of the "Murderbot" (hence The Murderbot Diaries), a cyborg generally treated by society as a piece of equipment.

Martha Wells's writing does a good job of showing Murderbot's personality, its particular anxieties, its relationships towards humans, and general attitudes towards life. Even if the plot is cliche, Murderbot as a character is the opposite.

Machine (2020, Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers) 4 stars

More better White Space

4 stars

Elizabeth Bear's second White Space novel is, in some ways, better than the first. Once again, the story is told through the eyes of a compelling and complex character. The setting of the novelโ€”a post-scarcity interstellar polity called the Synarcheโ€”is once again central to the novel, but the this time the inner workings of the Synarche, the relationship of its various citizens to it, and its flaws are examined in greater detail and from a more internal perspective, which makes the setting more interesting.

The novel suffers from pacing that could be better at times. We get to hear a lot of what the protagonist's thoughts are, but sometimes this feels redundant, with her explaining her already previously stated feelings on the situation multiple times, which does help to establish the stakes and motivations, but past a certain point feels a bit redundant.

Once again, this is an entertaining novel โ€ฆ