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Some stuff got tied up it the second book of this trilogy, and the third one tied up some plots that were left over. It also dropped in a whole bunch of new plots. There is a lot of stuff happening here. Some of it gets tied up, some of it kind of fizzles out, and some of it is left not entirely resolved. At times, the pacing feels a bit off—the story could have been more spread out over the latter two of the trilogy's books, or maybe even the whole thing. Nevertheless, an enjoyable read.

Ken MacLeod will come up with a future in which a superpower polity implementing specific and particular kind of market socialism gets into a bunch of international intrigue involving space travel and maybe aliens, and then write a trilogy about it. Entertaining, if that's your sort of thing.

I think Martha Wells can write any story where a large part of the overarching plot is a bunch of people moving around a large facility and doing stuff, and I will enjoy it.

Well, that was a pretty interesting queer solarpunk alien first contact story.

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It's kind of an interesting series of books, because the whole framing is, like, as a historical document describing contemporary events... the same way you'd read a historical document today, and you might be slightly outraged by the things that the people from the time got up to, but at the same time you get an insight into how they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