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Dee 📖 (book aspect) Locked account

Dee@books.underscore.world

Joined 3 years, 7 months ago

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

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Dee 📖 (book aspect)'s books

Emily Tesh: Some Desperate Glory (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 5 stars

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …

Some Desperate Glory

5 stars

On the surface, this may seem like military SF, but really, it's more about trauma, and radicalization, and cults, and personal growth. It's well-written, too. When following the perspective of an initially angry teenager as she then changes as a person, it is possible to lay things on too thick, but Tesh manages to do it just right.

This sort of shifting perspective also makes the worldbuilding of the setting interesting. The view of the novel's world is colored by the characters' biases, and how those biases shift, and those shifts play a role in the overall plot. The overall plot is perhaps a bit of the standard SF fare, but the way it is told through the arcs of the characters involved is what makes it compelling.

This book stands out in both its approach to the kind of plot and setting it employs, and also in doing what …

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Service Model (EBook, 2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

Meets optimal performance targets

4 stars

This book starts with a bunch of absurd humor, and as the story goes on, that humor gets mixed in with the darkness of the dystopian setting and overall plot. It kind of resembles Tchaikovsky's Cage of Souls, but whereas that book was more adventure, this one is more dark comedy.

Tchaikovsky does manage to pull off the combination well. The main character, being a robot, brings a bunch of robotic aloofness to the narration, which actually works pretty well with the overall mixture of simultaneously aloof and dark tone of the book. While the main character keeps encountering perhaps too-poignant and neatly tied up episodes of his adventure, like the hero in some sort of a fable (which is where the comparison to Cage of Souls comes to mind), the character is sufficiently compelling to carry the book forward.

The conclusion to the overall plot could perhaps be more …

Entertaining enough

3 stars

This novel is a fun action-adventure romp involving starships and a number of colorful characters. It is not a elaborate story with sophisticated story that explores complex themes of political or philosophical nature. Sometimes you want a fun action-adventure romp, though, and this book mostly delivers in that area. There's dramatic chases, creepy abandoned facilities, fighting, narrow rescues, cleverly competent problem solving, and other such things.

One complaint is that at times the writing can be a bit too verbose, throwing the pacing off. L. M. Sagas has a habit of writing paragraphs detailing characters' mental state at emotionally fraught moments, but often, instead of conveying the intensity of the character's feelings, it just feels redundant. One could also get into nitpicks about how some of the side characters are a bit flat, or how the plot, devoid of any large gaping holes, nevertheless sometimes takes some liberties for convenience. …

Ken MacLeod: Beyond the Light Horizon (2024, Start Publishing LLC) 4 stars

A whole bunch of stuff happening

4 stars

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.

Arkady Martine: Rose/House (EBook, Subterranean Press) 4 stars

Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with.

A house embedded with an artificial intelligence …

Crime fiction but also cyberpunkish but also creepy mystery

4 stars

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.

Martha Wells: Witch King (EBook, 2023, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC) 4 stars

Kai-Enna is the Witch King, though he hasn’t always been, and he hasn’t even always …

Interesting and well-executed approach to worldbuilding

4 stars

Witch King features a lot of worldbuilding. Its fantasy world is inhabited by different people with different cultures, and people who can different sorts of magic in different sorts of way, and Martha Wells manages to weave details about this world into the story in a way that makes the world feel alive (except for all the dead people).

The setting is also one with a history of dramatic upheavals and epic struggles, though the story is not set during those things. The main narrative is set years after major historical events, whose effects are still felt by the present-day characters. We also get flashbacks of events around the major historical events. In this way, the book tells a history by telling of its aftermath, and the events that preceded it. This is something that could be executed poorly, leaving a disappointing gap, but it actually works pretty well in …

reviewed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

Yoon Ha Lee: Ninefox Gambit (EBook, 2016, Solaris) 4 stars

When Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Kel Command …

Interesting concepts, and good execution

4 stars

This is the kind of book that really gets into worldbuilding, especially in the earlier parts. The reader is introduced to all sorts of weird concepts in the universe, and even if the earlier introductions feel like a bit of a dump, they are smooth—the setting is inventive with its space magic empire, but shows that it is a space magic empire from the get go. The overall concept of the book's universe is, by itself, also captivating.

There are ways to do vast, dystopian interstellar empires well, and there are ways to do them badly. Fortunately, Ninefox Gambit does them well. The story is pretty dark, and the setting is grim, but it doesn't feel gratuitous. Horrible things do happen to characters, but they happen to characters, instead of merely as an arbitrary background violence that punctuates the point. The story feels like it is, appropriately enough, about …

Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice (EBook, 2013, Orbit) 4 stars

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

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 …

Content warning general Terra Ignota series spoilers