Kavinay

I sincerely wish that all the dark ages books could be like this. I don't care about backwater inner sphere nonsense. High stakes clan plotlines and action make up for everything that makes dark age otherwise a frustrating era.

Jasek Kelswa-Steiner. He's so dreamy. Every woman wants him.

Meanwhile, Tara Bishop dies off the page and we return to women pining for Jasek.

Blergh.

Hard to feel sympathetic for the Inner Sphere, unless that was the point?

Interesting catch up on Clan life. In fact, all the Jade Falcon stuff is pretty good. However, the actual prose itself is quite clunky, as if it was dictated first. The voice is choppy at points and makes you wonder if the book could have benefited from some more editing.

A fairly dull first act, but that's by design: living on the run is depressing. Gets better from there.

Not what I expected. It covers a lot of ground but leaves a lot of Tukkayid unexplored. Interesting regardless as it sets the stage for everything that's going to happen up to 3067.

Really engaging, especially if you're a big fan of TNG. It's interesting to see how the creative staff saw the subsequent sequels and films become more erratic in quality too.

The only bad thing to say is that the new Kelvin-timeline movies are basically given a pass compared to the in-depth autopsies on the TNG films.

Can get a bit clunky at spots (lots of nobels and elites prone to moping internal dialogues) , but still a fun read. It's where the clan invasion and culture starts to get fleshed out, and all the era's who's-who of the Inner Sphere youth experience the Wolf Dragoons version of Hogwarts.

I know the story, but it's still fun. Stackpole shows us how the Inner sphere and the Clans are basically a more exciting take on Game of Thrones than what GRRM would later publish in 1996!

Ends too soon. Good history of D&D up to Gygax's death. Would have been perfect if it covered the orgies of the WotC era.

It's a weird combination of archetypes. Starts as standard Imperial fare, becomes a warp horror show and then bolter porn for the rest.

Not horrible, but a bit of an empty story in terms of relevance to the meta plot. Sure, there's a bunch of ink spilled about Vulkan's corpse, but this is nothing that a short story couldn't have covered with less painful asides.

It still blows me away that Sakai can find ways to deepen and expand Usagi's tales. I mean how many “Ronin Rabbit gets in a scrape” stories can you write? Somehow, Sakai always makes it engaging.

Saddened to know that I've caught up with this series. Consistently brilliant.

LOL, what a tease. It's almost as if every book threatens to at least bring Luthor and the Lion to a confrontation but then stops... and waits. Still, it's a far more interesting storyline than anything involving an Ultramarine!

Good grief. Everything that ends up on Calth and becomes uninteresting. Story starts fine and the Word Bearers are genuinely interesting. But once you get to Calth, urk.

Reflections of a recovering, sociopathic scientist.

There are some books that transcend the trappings of franchise fiction to provide a novel that is both profound and moving.

This is not it.

Good grief. This is the sort of shorter work that Corey puts out just to show off. “Yes, I can write hard sci-fi, but I can also effortlessly push out whatever other genre I feel like too.”

Breaking Bad on Mars...

A sarcastic teenage girl tells an Old Man's War. Ugh.

Scalzi does a great job capturing the voice of a teenage girl. That's great writing... but Gilmore Girls in space is not my thing.

Meh.

Spent the entire second half of the novel wanting to punch the antagonist in the face...

Important to know: Lando lives.
Less surprising: no one likes you if Darth Vader is your father.

Great stuff. Space opera on a grand but gritty scale.

A more interesting reboot than most attempts at Diana.

It's basically “the gods be crazy” in DC style