Ben Saufley

I loved the first two books in this series. I had read some other reviews of those books that were critical of Blake's prose, but it generally felt apt for the story, for the characters. This one, right away, the prose seemed to go immediately up its own ass fast—not just whimsical and flowery, but disjointed and alienating. I pushed through because I wanted to know how this all resolved. The prose settled a little, for a while. But the book never really found its feet before it lost them again. The result of the experiment was both anticlimactic and perplexing. Maybe the writing style obscured the intent—not even just the intent, but the actual events that took place—but it seemed like that was the climax of the trilogy and in the end I don't even really know what happened or why.

And then it all fizzled out.

From the perspective of "I like these characters and want to see them succeed," there's a number of obvious disappointments, but characters failing can absolutely be a compelling narrative. Here, though, it all just felt like a whole bunch of …nothing? No happy endings, but plenty of people working against their own interest, with little to no character growth and a completely avoidable tragic outcome on multiple fronts.

I was really disappointed with this book, both as a piece of writing and as the resolution to a series I had really enjoyed.

I think this wrapped up the series pretty well. I do feel like, at times, it was almost more of a kind of description of a possible ideal (with a big asterisk) future than a novel, and it almost left the characters behind as it did that. And I'm not actually sure I think the eventual state of affairs on Earth is any kind of improvement, all things considered. But it was internally consistent and thought-provoking. As I've said with the whole series, it takes some pretty interesting ideas and applies a kind of layer of cartoonishness to it all, but again, I think it stuck the landing for what it was well enough.

It was interesting that at a certain point, I started wondering if the book was going to wrap up as an appeal to faith. There was a part of the book that very much felt like it was trying to draw parallels (beyond, obviously, the Tonists more explicitly) between The Thunderhead and some kind of deity—not just within the novels' universe, which happened a lot, but more as a meta-narrative. In the end I don't think it went that way.

I do kind of wish we learned more about the world Citra and Rowan ended up building—we learned a bit about the Tonists through the theological interludes (and, disappointingly, learned how much information was clearly lost), but we only got a brief look at Citra waking up at the very end.

I picked this up after mostly enjoying The Writing Retreat, and so I knew going in that there was a risk that, like that novel, this one would be muddied by a layer of "is it real or isn't it" supernatural/mystical elements. I didn't love it either time—mostly because I think it's just not compelling to not commit. In this book, like the last, everything supernatural could generally be hand-waved away (although there are a lot of "coincidences" in this one that don't really get explained) as dreams, delusions, hallucinations, etc. But I feel like: do it or don't. Either commit to the premise and let things actually be supernatural, or commit to the premise that they weren't. The gray area makes for a much less satisfying thriller, for me, because thrillers are all about "what's really happening here?" and leaving the answer as "who knows?" is just kind of frustrating. But it was an entertaining-enough read. I didn't hate it, overall. I just think it could've been more satisfying when it was all over.

I think the central premise of this book is extremely compelling, and it gives a large number of examples to prove its point. I guess I was a little surprised, as well, that the general philosophy is not particularly interested in assigning intent to the press it's criticizing, and at times (although I think this was less well fleshed-out) explains some ways in which the manufacturing of consent, the "propaganda model", is almost inevitable simply because of how the information ecosystem is managed by those in power.

It does spend a lot of time on specific events, which is fine but also I think left room for the criticism that there was an axe to grind. Even though it's been updated and revised, it's still largely focused on things half a century ago, and while I think the book made few excuses for the actions what could be considered ideological allies on the left (the main argument is generally "here are similar bad things that happened, one under a communist government, and one under that of a generally-right-leaning American ally, and here's how coverage differed") it did, at times, read as defense.

And for me, as someone who was born after much of this took place, I didn't have solid footing for judging how much of the information coming my way had its own ideological slant, so I was forced to take much of it at face value. That worked best in cases where direct quotes were at play—for example juxtaposing a right-wing think tank's criticism of Vietnam War coverage with the actual things people inside the US Government had been saying at the time, and showing that if anything, press coverage was rosier than the internal narrative.

I think that while the events discussed were from a different era, the most maddening thing in this book is watching how the right is still trying to work the refs in exactly the same way, and actually getting results—see, for example, the recent changes at CBS. It's been longer than my lifetime that smart people have been pointing out the harm that things like access journalism can do, and the way in which the media is manipulated by the government and especially by right-wing and military interests; and yet we still have pillars of the news world standing firm on the idea that actually, the media has a left-wing bias problem. So much of the debate we're hearing today was already well-trodden ground when this book was first published almost 40 years ago, and that's … bleak.

I really liked this book. The magic is interesting, the characters are sympathetic and compelling, and the romance is sweet and sincere. I think the third act lost me a little bit as action films sometimes do—I start to tune out when the conflicts get larger and less personal—but it never zoomed too far out, and I think it stuck the landing well-enough, albeit with a bit of a deus ex machina, almost literally, averting any significant stakes.

The book also does admirably at injecting a pretty familiar Arthurian fantasy setting with some subversion of the Anglo puritanism you might expect, and I think it did it very naturally, and in a number of ways that allowed characters to simply be rather than needing to provide some narrative purpose in their identity. Though it's probably worth noting that the central protagonists are by all appearances cis and though the characters are bi, the central romance is straight. Which is of course OK! But it does then leave the trans and nonbinary characters, and queer stories, in the background.

Adequately entertaining. I don't tend to red series immediately in sequence but I almost rushed to pick up the next. It's a bit cartoonish, and I think probably the premise justifies that even if I do think some of the concepts introduced in this series, while fanciful, are fascinating and could probably be explored with a bit more seriousness. I'll definitely read the next, soon.

I only realized after I completed this that it was a sort-of-sequel to another book in my TBR pile, 2034. I wonder if I would've liked it better if I'd read that first, because it's apparent that some of the characters it fixates on from the past were a part of that one. But it's just kind of … all over the place. It's about the Singularity? Except not really.

It tries to weave a political thriller without taking sides in the current political climate, for which I can of course understand the impulse, but what you're left with is a political thriller with no politics. I think I was supposed to like that Castro's party was ousted from power but I had very little reason to because there were very few actual "political" things happening. And actually, a military coup is not something to aspire to—unless, I guess, you're a former Navy yourself. Re-reading the blurb:

> Combining a deep understanding of AI, biotech, and the possibility of a coming Singularity, along with their signature geopolitical sophistication, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis have once again written a visionary work.

This is just hilarious. There's no deep understanding of any of those things in this novel. It's very surface-level kind-of-sci-fi. And "geopolitical sophistication"? Yeesh.

I'm kind of curious to read the other just because I want to know how it colors my experience of this book, and this one was at least easy enough to get through that it wouldn't take too much to give the other one a shot.

This was a fun duology. The scope of this one broadened significantly and I think with a lot of books and movies that take a similar route, I find myself checking out—but I enjoyed all the twists and turns, for the most part, and I never lost sight of the characters at the center, which kept me invested. The epilogue was silly, though: she admirably swore off war… and then immediately un-swore it off in a scene that felt like the last scene of The Incredibles.