jackson

This is a hard book to rate for me.

I loved the first half. It incrementally builds out a very interesting world filled with neat sci-fi concepts, exploring lots of interesting ideas. Meanwhile, it gives us lots of time to get to know our main character, how she thinks, and the characters around her. The characters, sci-fi concepts, and philosophical musings make this section of the book a fantastic read.

In the second half, once she starts waking other humans up, it became much less interesting to me. The cast of characters grows so quickly that (understandably) few are given much page time to understand them. But either because of the size of the cast, or for other reasons, the other humans all fell flat for me - 1-dimensional and uninteresting. Even our main character gets less interesting, as we have less time with her thoughts, so her actions start to feel less realistic, less relatable. Meanwhile, a bland political plot unfolds with a bland romantic sub-plot. Lacking compelling plot or characters by the end, I was ready for it to be done and left disappointed. 

 Pretty good and makes a compelling and important argument about what to do about the direction technology is developing.

My only complaints:
- The tone felt akin to an armchair-expert uncle telling you about something
- It entirely lacked citations. Maybe that's standard for this kind of book, and I doubt he had many/any inaccuracies, but he made a lot of statements about things that happened or how things are that could use references. 

A cool coloring-in of the happenings around events from the main books, and well-written as always, but it was tough to stay engaged. It seemed like each time I was really getting invested in each story and it's new characters, it ended and was time for the next one. Maybe collections of short stories just aren't for me.

One writing device employed a couple of times here that I thought was really neat - a viewpoint that moves with an object or logical chain of events instead of just one character. Abercrombie does a great job of quickly getting the reader into the new character's viewpoint, and the overall effect is quite interesting.

Pretty decent, but not amazing. A good, compelling read with a good heart, but there really isn't much going on here. The writing tone doesn't quite land - feels like it's trying to be casual and funny, which it kind of is, but not really. As far as sci-fi goes, the core concept is pretty cool, but compared to other sci-fi, the envisioning of the future is pretty shallow and doesn't feel very ‘real'. Apparently 2080 is largely just like today but with a couple additional pieces of cool tech. Still, looking past that, it's a pretty good story in an interesting setting.

(listened to audiobook) The audiobook narration, as can be expected from Fry, was great. 

The telling of the stories was entertaining and generally enhanced by Fry's commentary. However, much of the book didn't take the form of coherent narratives and occasionally was just a recounting of names, relationships, etymologies, or other facts outside of narrative structure. These parts, for me, detracted from the overall experience.