AramZS

There are some really good ideas, world-building, and setup here but the execution is just poorly organized and paced. Writing itself is pretty good on a sentence to sentence basis. The book just couldn't stop tripping up the psychodrama it was aiming for. There were a bunch of moments that were clearly supposed to be gasp reveals that it just couldn't land, they ended up confusing instead of dramatic. It also simply didn't give itself the space to deliver on its big scifi idea sadly. Then it can't land the ending. I'd try future books by this author, but this one just doesn't work sadly.

This book is a great deal of fun once you get in to it, even if it is not–as some sellers are advertising–a Culture novel.

Sadly, also just not quite as clever as the Culture novels. It's very good, better than most SF, but while many Culture novels can have a rough start they all build to big satisfying payoffs. This one was all a little too obvious and, as a result, just not as satisfying an end or a book. All that said, a great world to live in for a while.

Imagine if Dan Brown was smart and Neal Stephenson was better at integrating his deep historical research into the plot and also the fascinating history of the deep weirdness of internecine catholic conflict was the setting for a murder mystery and you've got this book. Not an easy read, hard to believe there was one an era where this book was very popular, but worth the work. I recommend it.

There's a distinct writing style here that plants this book firmly in its age of publication, but put that aside and you'll find a set of great science fiction stories that seem remarkably ahead of their time, very interested in many of the same topics and technological conundrums we would write about today.

Look it's Alan Moore's Silmarillion. Either that's your jam or it isn't, but it certainly makes this book impossible to recommend.