Carter

Another book with a very different feel from the first trilogy. I enjoyed the characters and intrigue in the first half of the book as the plan began to take shape and was set into motion, but I preferred the second half as the Honored Matres made their move and it became a race for all the pieces to fall into place. I was a little disappointed or confused at the reveal of the plan at the end, and am wondering if Chapterhouse will help.

I’m certainly considering Phlebas. There was a lot of action in this book, and though some of it got densely descriptive and confusing, it was still intense. Banks bends the third-person limited perspective in really interesting ways and starts breaking the rules of his prose to create tension or mystery in a very cool way. Story was very intentionally bleak, done well. Feels like I would need to read it again to truly appreciate it, but I think Horza is a fascinating and complex character.

It was very fast-paced, fun action, but I can’t help but feel that it could have been more. Blue Team and Johnson are always fun but John was the only character with a real arc, and even that wasn’t much. The coolest original character, Tel ‘Szatulai, got the Zuka treatment except basically off-screen, and Nizat’s only arc was watching Survey get capped. Petora was only a lens into the innies for like thirty pages.

After finishing with Dune, Asimov’s Foundation reads remarkably fast. The pacing of the book is fast and unique, for it is essentially 5 different short stories connected by chronology and setting. The story and concept are interesting by themselves, but they sort of betray the stakes of the plot. I hope that this novel serves as mostly an introduction to the concept of the series, otherwise the books will be very repetitive.

I felt a lot better about the pacing of this book compared to Heretics. I also think the ending was handled better, and the plans within plans felt more solid and follow-able than in Heretics. Although Herbert planned for a seventh and final book, I think this ending of several important characters and ideas going out in their own Scattering is very poignant, and it works. This also may be the fastest I read a Dune novel.

The Master Chief blows up a 20-mile long ship with surprising ease and is then forced to solve the trolley problem. A lot of this book was not super memorable, but I liked seeing the cunning side of Halsey with the Boren's syndrome situation. The slipspace-bubble-time-stuff was weird. I liked the make-shift vibes of Chief's return home, with the Gettysburg-Ascendant Justice and the nuke they left behind.

Banks writes with a specific sophistication that oft leaves me wondering whether it is my fault or his that I do not fully understand his characters. I thought the reveal of the Chair and Chairmaker was insane, and the reveal that Cheri was instead Elethiomel was confusing. I don't think I ever fully understood our protagonist's motivations, and the end only sort of helped. Despite this, I think the novel's themes still were clear and powerful.

So brainwashing kids is okay as long as they don't have parents anymore. Kurt was a very good and compelling character. His arc was satisfying and his death was done very well. Tom and Lucy were also very important and real characters that touched into how dark and awful the Spartan experience really is.

A bunch of cavemen walk around for about 30 chapters and then it gets really good. This book was definitely a lot slower than its predecessor, and it was a bit harder to get through. It maintained the air of mystery about the world but the plot felt lacking until towards the end. However, the last chunk of the book got incredibly good. The interrogation with the Primordial made the slowness of the book until that point worth it.

Buck is just the goat I don't know what else to say he's delightful. The writing style was perfect for Buck and turned what would have otherwise been a very straightforward story into a lovely scatterbrained retelling of Buck's entire life and career. This book was charming and fun, which Halo doesn't often get to maintain for that long.

Proof that the Covenant could've won the war in like 2 years if Truth and Regret just communicated. I loved the complexity and intrigue of the plot, though I found that other than Delgado, Thel, and Keyes, I found myself not really caring about the characters. And I already cared about Thel and Keyes so that doesn't really count.

"How do we explain Blue Team being gone for all of Halo 3?" Very interesting story that dives deep into morality and politics in the Halo universe, while also creating a likeable found family. A strong start to a strong trilogy. Lucy was a highlight of this book.

Sergeant Johnson is overshadowed by a love story between an Unggoy and a Huragok. Johnson's story was boring and uninspired. Every other story, however, was very interesting. We got some amazing insight into the Covenant and the root of its corruption, the Huragok-Unggoy plot was delightful, and the AI love story was unique.

Who would win: A millennia old parasite or a guy named Jenkins? John's side of the story did not add a lot to what we already know from Combat Evolved. Zuka's story was alright but nothing special. Jenkins' story was the most compelling, but I don't know how sound it is when compared to the modern day canon.

"I don't want your sadness." "It is the Mantle." Who knew the Halo 4 required reading would be so incredible? I love this book a lot. It creates such a fascinating and deep world with some of the most unique writing I've seen. I find myself re-reading parts of the book frequently because there is so much depth and thought in each piece of dialogue and character interaction.

Man I can't wait to see what they do with this Jul 'Mdama character. This book felt a tad slower but still very good. Jul's story was the part I enjoyed the most, as he is a good example of what Halo excels at: villains with understandable and even defendable motives. Jul understandably didn't trust humanity's motives and Kilo-Five proves him right, leading the reader to question who they should be cheering for in a prisoner's dilemma.

No one hates Catherine Halsey more than Karen Traviss and man am I glad cause it led to this banger of a book. My favorite of this trilogy. A beautiful story that delves into the consequences of Halsey's Spartan-II program. Sentzke was an incredible antagonist and the story that Traviss crafted was emotional and effective. The book had me rooting for everyone, and the ending delivered perfectly.

Dude if my wife made me clone myself and then the clone cucked me and then my political opponent sent me to be killed and then an eldritch horror corrupted my mind and then it turned out I was right about how to deal with the parasite the whole time and then the entire galaxy got wiped clean I'd be pissed too. What else can I say. This book was the perfect ending to a fascinating and incredible story. Every part of it was amazing.

Another very solid space opera, though this one is both more palatable and less uniquely impressive than Consider Phlebas. I liked the themes of passion and obsession, but felt they could have been played better or perhaps louder. The game of Azad itself was very interesting and the descriptions of play were cool. The twist of Gurgeh’s purpose was not very surprising, but Flere-Imsaho’s true nature was indeed. I love Banks’ politics.

Miraculously, unbelievably, this novel manages to connect the stories of Halo 4, 5, and Infinite in so poignant and enthralling a fashion that I can’t help but feel amazed. It did start somewhat slow, and there was a lot of reiteration of the Didact’s story, but I think this allows for it to truly stand alone and be a jumping in point for fans of just the games. And god was that ending beautiful. Also clears up some ambiguity from Bear.

This final Foundation book brought the series full-circle in both chronology and style, for it was a series of four short stories chronicling the last decades of Hari Seldon’s life and the completion of his goal to develop psychohistory as a practical science. It concluded his story as set up in Prelude very nicely, and provided context to the original trilogy. This story, more than Prelude, shows the strength of Seldon’s character.

I don’t really know that this book is necessary. Yes, the plot twist that Hummin and Demerzel were both Daneel was pretty cool, yes it was cool getting to know Hari, and yes Hari and Dors’ relationship was nice but… most to the plot truly did not matter. The different Trantorian sectors were cool, but all they did was allow Hari to realize something that wasn’t truly that profound, and we didn’t really learn anything new.

In this (chronologically) final Foundation novel, Asimov ties together with a stroke the story of telepathic Robots, Daneel, and the origin of Gaia, and the demonstrates the almost-fatal flaw in the Seldon Plan. Having planned out none of this, I think that the book does a solid job at closing the universe and making all fit almost as it if was intentional. I do wish we got more of a conclusive ending to Golan and Janov’s stories.

Asimov really brought it back with this one. Robots and Empire had the thoughtful, logic-puzzle complexities of I, Robot that I felt were somewhat missing from the Lije Baley books. I loved Daneel and Giskard as protagonists having to work around their robotic nature in order to save humanity. I liked the Foundation callbacks, I liked Amadiro's scheme, and I found the debate around the Zeroth Law very compelling. A great conclusion.

You can tell that this book was written after Foundation. Similar to Foundation’s Edge, the book is tied much more clearly to the greater Foundation universe, and although it continues the Earth/Spacer political struggle, it also acts as a sort of origin story of psychohistory, and confirms some details of the story of Gaia. I do feel that Giskard’s mind-reading wasn’t as satisfyingly foreshadowed as previous twists.