Kavinay
Disclaimer: I liked Lost Stars. I don't mind YA titles, nor the idea of a romantic one. This book though is profoundly frustrating. About halfway through, I gave up hoping to enjoy it and kept going in case any new bits of the canon were fleshed out. They weren't. There's really no good reason to read this book.
Why is it so frustrating? The novel goes out of its way to both point out Leia's privilege and her awareness of it, but it's just so dull to observe Leia learning what we already know about the nascent Rebellion. It's a fatal flaw, as this tack just makes her come across as young Picard in “Rascals” rather than someone we can empathize with.
Coates is equally depressing and inspiring. Depressing because his view is somewhat bleak: there is no easy solution for white supremacy. Inspiring because simply articulating the manner in which people are racialized and taken advantage of over and over again is itself a triumphant act.
I wonder if this is why people of colour appreciate Coates: he can describe the many little and great concessions we make every day without the faux-inspirational rhetoric of a political agenda of progress. For Coates, and frankly many of us, nothing is all that surprising about modern race relations. From the Civil War to Trump, the practice of white supremacy is generally pretty straightforward. From the case for reparations the first white president, Coates keeps pointing out the same things: institutions make it really easy to entrench white power and excuse the disenfranchisement of blacks. The apologetics for the poor white working class that elected Trump are really nothing new or surprising. They're part of tradition and that tradition is one of white supremacy.
What I found unexpectedly interesting in this book is Coates' personal thoughts and development through the eight years of the Obama presidency. It's not just growth but also a realization that expectations and reality are never linear or progressive.
I was pleasantly surprised. How do you tell stories when the new post RotJ canon is still in flux? Liu pulls a clever trick and couches all of Luke's tales in narratives that range from unreliable to over-awed. It makes for a fun and wide ranging group of short stories. Not a lot of lore, but enough bits of interest to tide you over until The Last Jedi.
Every once in a while, someone will venture forth with a pseudo-academic diatribe about how colonialism and imperialism were ultimately valuable for nations captured by European mercantile and military might.
They also tend to be the people who will tell you how clever Churchill was, how The British Raj created modern India and how the British Empire should be a source of pride.
In such cases, I recommend you point such committed imperialists to the staggering body of documentation and evidence that Madhusree Mukerjee has collected in Churchill's Secret War.
The picture that emerges of British efforts to starve India for political gain is monstrous.
Mukerjee doesn't even have to take a side. She lets British officials both close to Churchhill's administration and The Raj flay the PM and the empire in their honest assessment of the quiet genocide perpetrated during World War II.
An empire of famine, condescension and pride: Churchill and Britain are impossible to apologize for after you've read this book.
A “Sopranos” turn.
For several books and short stories, Dembski-Bowden has had you empathizing with monsters. This book quickly reverses that exposes all the despair and depravity that the Night Lords and Talos himself suffer.
A fantastic ending that brings us full-circle... with an epilogue that I anticipated from the last short story and found immensely satisfying.
This is a nearly perfect space marine novel. First Claw and the Night Lords are profoundly interesting compared to their thin-blooded loyalist brethren. The Blood Reaver himself is the Tyrant of Badab (which is such a love-lettter to old geeks like me who still have their 40k Compendiums). Much comes to a head but even more seeds are sown for the final book in the trilogy.
It sounds dumb, but stuff happens and characters develop! This is actually quite rare in much franchise fiction and especially when dealing with the bad guys. Dembski-Bowden has you ending up empathizing with monsters.
GW should have used this story for their animated project instead of Ultramarines.
Up till now, Dan Abnett's Prospero Burns was my high-water mark for 30k/40k ficiton. Soul Hunter is really good. It may even better than Prospero Burns and I'm a Space Wolves fan.
In a sense, Dembski-Bowden pulls of a Soprano's maneuver with Talos and the Night Lords. You know they're the bad guys, but inch by inch you get pulled into seeing the Imperium and the long war through their crimson lenses. It's not just Octavia who's on their side by the final chapter.
It's a really clever bit of writing. Especially in regards to CSM politics. They could easily be slavering morons, but even Abaddon is depicted with more nuance than you'd expect. The Exalted in particular–well I really didn't see his arc coming to be honest.
I'm generally interested in BT for the Clans and their psycho-culture. The 3025 and Succession War campaigns generally are just grist for the Kerensky mill for me (i.e. this is why you needed Operation Revival).
That being said, Charrette's depiction of Minobu Tetsuhara is deceptively good. The novel isn't really about Wolf's Dragoons. It's actually a really good take on the noblest of Inner Sphere warriors set against the Game of Thrones style politics of the Successor Lords and pretenders. Even when you know how the book will end, it's still a very compelling read and develops so much of the DCMS culture beyond the otaku-ness of Stackpole's novels.
Honestly, the story is just plodding. You get the sense that Coates is doing some good world-building but in all that exposition, the actual stories themselves are frequently gummed up in monologues. Case in point: T'Challa spends several pages travelling in an astral/dream plane to save Shuri, and he just keeps talking and talking to himself.
The real saving grace is that Wakanda is in a sense the most interesting character in the book.
Not what I was expecting. It's a bit of a muddle for the first few issues and you only see the political angle start to take shape in the last of five issues.
There's almost too much continuity to unpack. It's frustrating because it makes it hard to understand the context of T'Challa's challenges and goals. At best, he just seems a bit emo and boring. Comic characters shouldn't resemble Hamlet.
There's potential though as hopefully Coates can now weave everything together.
