Luca Masters

• The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: 4 stars: surprisingly good for what it was.
  * Exhalation: 5-stars, top-notch, feels like 1950s era scifi, very good concept.
  * What's Expected of Us: 4.5 stars until it says some stupid stuff that implies it doesn't even remotely understand the concept, made me mad by being stupid: 2 stars.
  * The Lifecycle of Software Objects: 3.5 stars: feels like it had a bunch of points, none of which were well-explored.
  * Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny: 2 stars: boring, uninteresting.
  * The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling: 4 stars: good concept.
  * The Great Silence: 3 stars: good concept, fine for what it is, but what it is isn't a great read.
  * Omphalos: 4 stars: again, great concept, also feels like 1950s era scifi, but not developed as well as it could've been.
  * Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom: 4.5 stars: great concept, pretty good story, weird ending that distracts from some of its better points.

It's always weird when I review a book by a friend (or in this case the husband of a parasocial Twitter friend) ‘cause I know I'm supposed to give five stars. But I recently read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and gave that four stars, so understand my rating in that context: it was very good, I enjoyed it a lot, but it was “only” Heinlein-level quality.

This is a sort of Firefly-esque universe, with a good “classic sci-fi” feel. The author clearly knows actual science, but uses it merely to make the technical aspects accurate. It's engaging and keeps up a good fast-but-not-hectic pace throughout.

Highly enjoyable. Impatiently awaiting the eventual sequels.

Ever read a book and think “this is really dated?” This book is dated. It was published, mind you, in 2017, but in fifty years, people will read it and say “this was written 2010-2030”.

The plot is highly enjoyable, and engaging until it the end when it's entirely unsatisfying and bad. I enjoyed it a lot most of the way through, despite periodically cringing at the occasional “I'm an English major” writing and the “I'm a left-Liberal circa 2020” commentary. (I'm also a left-Liberal circa 2020, but that doesn't mean they don't make me cringe.)

Also, you know how some books you read and something in it (usually how it presents a woman) makes you think “this was written by a man”? There were a couple “this was written by a woman” scenes in here. Most books I read are written by women, but this may be the first time I've had this reaction to a scene. Plenty of “the narrator/character is a woman, and if the author is an man he really nailed it” books. This one did not nail it.

Anyway, this is a mostly-good, enjoyable book with a good plot with an unsatisfying ending and a few weirdly bad scenes, and an overly 2010s/early-2020s feel to the writing. It annoys me that it didn't live up to its potential.

This felt like a low-detail story about an old, sacred mythology, which is great, except it also needs characters with agency, and maybe a plot. Will has no agency–things happen to him and the world around him, and occasionally he knows what to do because Old Ones have Knowledge, but there's no decision making in order to address obstacles. Similarly, the plot feels preordained. It has no agency in its shaping. This is just How Things Go in the old story.

I recall liking it as a kid, but never being super into it. That's sort of how I feel now, but I like it less.

Hegemon leaves the confines of Battle School to enter a world of international politics, and as much as I love international politics, I was glad Card didn't abandon the characters and character-level plot. Bean grows, Petra grows, Peter grows (though he's relatively ancillary–he's neither protagonist nor antagonist), Achilles...doesn't really grow. In Ender's Shadow, for a few paragraphs, we actually saw into Achilles' mind. In this book, we see him act and others' evaluations of his behavior, but they add nothing new to his personality–in fact they fail to draw on the peak we got in the previous book.

Over all, this book is similar in style to the previous two and added an aspect I very much enjoy (high-level politics, not just individuals bickering and seeking power), but I didn't enjoy it quite as much. Achilles did not interest me, and the genius of Bean, Peter, etc. occasionally felt unbelievable to me when applied to human behavior rather than strategy. There's a point where Bean insists Achilles would have at least three back-ups–why at least three? I don't care how smart Achilles is or how well Bean knows him. Humans make decisions far too arbitrarily and options are far too varied to be predicted with that degree of specificity. Attempts to display the intelligence of the characters ranged from really good to kind of terrible.

Though not as good as Ender's Game or Ender's Shadow, this is definitely worth reading if you loved the previous two in this thread.