Joe Martin
This wasn't one of Sanderson's best novels. I enjoyed it, but it felt flat. The magic system was, in typical Sanderson style, interesting and engaging. The characters were less so. Fortunately, it wrapped up the story in one novel and I don't feel the need to seek out (or anxiously wait for) any sequels.
People who are more hardcore Star Wars fans will probably like this. Me? I thought the economics and politics were so nonsensical (literally, I could not see the sense in the motivations of anyone in this story) that they destroyed any enjoyment I might have had in learning about how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.
A short but very enjoyable read. If you like [b:Frankenstein 18490 Frankenstein Mary Shelley https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1381512375s/18490.jpg 4836639] and [b:Dracula 17245 Dracula Bram Stoker https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387151694s/17245.jpg 3165724], you owe it to yourself to read this humorous romp through the Victorian Gothic era.
This book was a ton of fun to read. It's a heist mystery, that's almost steam punk, set in the Mistborn universe. If you're a Brandon Sanderson fan that's pretty much all you need to know. If you're not a Brandon Sanderson fan, well, you're in for a real treat. I've been waiting for this book since mid-summer and I'm happy to say that I wasn't at all disappointed.
The best part of the Mistborn universe is the magical system that Sanderson created for these stories: allomancy, feruchemy. Allomancers can “burn” various metals (which they've swallowed in trace amounts), to get various powers: increased strength, speed, ability to influence emotions, the ability to Push or Pull on steel, etc. Feruchemists can store various attributes (speed, weight, knowledge) in metal and then retrieve it as needed.
The stories are very character driven and resemble super hero stories, in the way that the characters creatively use their allomantic or feruchemic powers. This particular book is filled with a few great puns, interesting characters, mysterious heists, detective work, and some incredible fight scenes.
This book wasn't perfect. I felt like the main villain took a bit too much inspiration from Batman Begins and Renard (the Bond villain). This is still a very good book, if that's the only weakness (and I thought it was).
How does this book fit into the rest of the Mistborn universe? I'll let Sanderson explain.
I pitched my editor a series where the first trilogy is an epic fantasy series, and then years later an urban fantasy series, and then years after that a science fiction series, all set in the same world. And the magic exists all through, and it is treated differently in each of these time periods. And that's what Alloy of Law is: looking at the Mistborn world, hundreds of years later, where society has been rebuilt following the events of the third book.
... This is actually a sort of side story I decided to start telling. ... With this one I decided to do something a little more action/adventure and a little more self-contained. So Alloy of Law is not the start of a trilogy, though I may do a little more with the characters, but in general the story I wanted to tell is told.
Now. Go forth, buy, and read.
This piece of space opera stars Wilson Cole, a space navy officer who never met an order he liked and who makes a habit of being demoted for cause. He's assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt for his insubordination. Once there, he proceeds to violate orders multiple times before finally mutinying and taking over the ship.
This is all supposed to be in the service of a grand adventure, starring a supremely competent officer. It fails because Cole is a jerk who's constantly explaining his own superior understanding of what everyone else should be doing. Worse, he's a loose cannon who acts on his own initiative, always impressed by his own abilities. If you developed a plan no failed to tell him the entire thing, he's exactly the type of officer that would screw it up, by taking the part of it he did know and deciding to “improve” it.
All of the other characters are wafer thin and seemingly only exist to either admire Cole's brilliance or make Cole look more brilliant by playing the part of the idiotic foil. There's the weapons tech who worships Cole, just because he disciplined the tech for being high on duty. There's the alien best friend, who will support him no matter what. And there's the beautiful security chief who will tell him everything, subverting ship,security to do so, , and who (of course) ends up in his bed.
Having been blinded by the light shining from Cole's halo, I have no interest in reading any further in this series.
Deeply, painfully moving. The North Korean state is horrifyingly evil in the way that it casually uses up the people that it's enslaved and destroys the natural bonds of family and community. This is such a well told story, focusing on one man, feeling what he's lost and never had, as a representative of the enslavement of an entire nation.
This is another novel of Kitai, Guy Gavriel Kay's analog to historical China. This book takes place in a time roughly equivalent to the early 12th century. Kay described his own setting, in the book's “Acknowledgement” section, along with his reason for working in historical fantasy, rather than historical fiction.
River of Stars is a work shaped by themes, characters, and events associated with China's Northern Song Dynasty before and after the fall of Kaifeng.
... I am significantly more at home shaping thoughts and desires for Lin Shan and Ren Daiyan, or developing the characters of my two Lu brothers, than I would be imposing needs and reflections (and relationships) on their inspirations: Li Qingzhao, the best-known female poet in China's history, General Yue Fei, or the magnificent Su Shi and his gifted younger brother. Not to mention other figures at the court (including Emperor Huizong himself) in the time leading up to and through the dynasty's fall.
River of Stars
He died too young in a war in which too many died.
We cannot know, being trapped in time, how events might have been altered if the dead had not died. We cannot know tomorrow, let alone a distant future. A shaman might claim to see ahead in mist but most of them (most of them) cannot truly do this: they go into the spirit world to find answers for today. Why is this person sick? Where will we find water for the herds? What spirit is angry with our tribe?
But sometimes storytellers want to inhabit certainty. They assume more than mortals ought. A tale-spinner by a hearth fire or gathering a crowd in a market square or putting brush to paper in a quiet room, deep into his story, the lives he's chronicling, will deceive himself into believing he has the otherworldly knowledge of a fox spirit, a river spirit, a ghost, a god.
He will say or write such things as, “The boy killed in the Altai attack on the Jeni encampment was likely to have become a great leader of his people, one who could have changed the north.”
Or, “Lu Mah, the poet's son, was one whose personal desire would have kept him living quietly, but his sense of duty and his great and growing wisdom would have drawn him to the court. He was lost to Kitai, and that made a difference.”
However boldly someone says this, or writes it, it remains a thought, a wish, desire, longing spun of sorrow. We cannot know.
We can say Mah's was a death too soon, as with O-Yan of the Jeni, their kaghan's little brother, slain in the first attack of a grassland rising. And we can think about ripples and currents, and wonder at the strangeness of patterns found—or made. A first death in the north and the death farthest south in the Altai invasion, in the years of the Twelfth Dynasty when the maps were redrawn.
But then, maps are always being redrawn. The Long Wall had once been the forbidding, fiercely guarded border of a great empire. We look back and we look ahead, but we live in the time we are allowed.
He died on that last thought, not the one about fearing a sword. That had come a moment before, while the man who ended his short span of days (Pu'la of the Altai was seventeen years old, his father's only son) had been levelling a bow.
It was a similar death—on guard at night, an arrow—to that of another young rider two summers before. O-Yan of the Jeni, fourteen years of age, had been killed by an arrow loosed by Pu'la's own skilled and deadly father on the night the Altai attacked the Jeni camp, beginning their assertion of themselves upon the world.
There might have been a lesson, a meaning, in this, or not. Most likely not, for who was there to learn of it, and what would the teaching be?
This story, set in a fictional country of Kitan, is loosely based on Tang China, the master poets of the dynasty, and the An-Lushan rebellion. I came to the story completely unfamiliar with Chinese history. I was captivated by the story and the beauty of the society that the story depicts.
Shen Tai, the second son of General Shen Gao, has spent the last two years in a solitary pursuit—he's been burying the dead at Kuala Nor. These are the soldiers killed during one of the last battles with the Taguran Empire. He's been burying the dead of both armies, as a way of honoring his late father's memory.
Near the end of his two years at Kuala Nor, Shen Tai receives a letter from the Taguran princess, giving him a gift of 250 Sardian horses. These are the most magnificent horses for hundreds of miles, coveted by everyone in Kitan. Men would kill for any of these horses, let alone 250 of them. This gift is both a potential death sentence and an incredible opportunity.
The rest of the story concerns both Shen Tai and the empire of Kitan, how they grew and changed and what effect the horses had on the course of history. This is a story about Kitan, the Tang Dynasty, as much as it is about Shen Tai or anyone else.
Like all of Guy Gavriel Kay's novels that I've read, this one is beautifully written and very moving. There are fantastical elements to the story, but they take a back seat to the characterizations and the evocative language. It's a story that forces you to appreciate human nature and the way that history can change on the smallest of decisions. It was a pleasure to read.
I like hard science fiction, but I don't like it for the stories. Most of the hard SF stories that I've read are a little bit thin in the plot department. Mostly I don't care, because I'm not reading them for the plot or the characters. I'm reading them for the ideas. It's a more enjoyable way to learn about science than actually reading journal articles.
This story isn't an exception to that generality. There wasn't a lot of plot and the characters weren't very deep. But the science was interesting. It had a lot of elements that I enjoy. There's a company called “Bootstrap” that exists to, well, bootstrap humanity into space, mining the incredible wealth in the asteroids.
Bootstrap uses cheap, disposable rockets and its initial flight is piloted by an intelligent squid. The flight is to an asteroid called Cruithne, which appears to orbit the earth in a very odd pattern. The launch date is sparked due to the Carter catastrophe.
The characters also use something called a Feynman radio, to pick up signals from the future. As things progress, we see a vision of a possible far, far future where humanity's distant descendants mine the stars themselves, and blackholes, for energy. The characters also witness a succession of universes, showing that our universe is but one of an evolutionary tree, with universes evolving from each other. It turns out that blackholes could be the means by which daughter universes are spawned.
All of these science elements are either real or quite plausible and Baxter gives a list of references, at the end of the book. Don't read this for the plot, but do read it for the ideas and the exploration of what could, quite possibly, be.
The best part of the book is the fact that Lord Magpyr is aware of every single vampire trope—and is determined to be unaffected by any of them. He intends to be the first of a new breed of vampire: invulnerable to anything. The main hitch in his plan isn't the witches. It's his servant Igor, who thinks that the old ways are the best and that his new master is a disgrace to the memory of the old Lord Magpyr.
This book is a humorous send-up for anyone who's ever enjoyed a Frankenstein movie, a Buffy episode, or Dracula itself.
I'd describe this as: “the one where Gytha Ogg and Esme Weatherwax go to Ankh-Morpok and meet the Phantom of the Opera.” I quite enjoyed it. Pratchett had some great humor around the inherently nonsensical nature of opera. And, of course, it's great fun to see what happens anytime that Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg interact with unsuspecting innocents.
I put this book on my reading ideas list because of the author's description of the story.
I wanted to portray contemporary biological science as it is actually done: with sophisticated equipment, as part of an international conversation, with career-impacting mistakes and triumphant corrections. Too often, the “science” in SF is of the cloning-in-a-basement-by-a-mad-scientist type, or else gibberish hand-waving (“If we hook up the actofrabble cycle to the Hartford drive, we can create galaxy-spanning life insurance!”). I have enormous respect for science and scientists (all right, I'm a science groupie) and I wanted to show biological discoveries being made under pressure, with the inevitable competition as well as the teamwork, as realistically as I could.
after
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This book was better than [b:Shadow's Edge|3754016|Shadow's Edge (Night Angel, #2)|Brent Weeks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327881435s/3754016.jpg|3797880], the previous book in the series. The action moved along at a brisk pace and there was plenty of it. Much more action than you normally get in a book of epic fantasy.
The action comes at a cost though. This entire series spent much less time on world building than typical epic fantasy novels do. I think that's a weakness of this action packed approach. Because it's epic fantasy, Brent Weeks created a large world with multiple different nations, complex politics, varied religions, and multiple different magic systems.
Weeks spent comparatively little time actually describing how everything worked. I spent a lot of time confused, wondering what was going on and what the significance of certain characters or actions was. Things were unexplained enough that I spent parts of the story wondering if I'd missed a previous book that set things up or if parts of this story were missing.
The story was also prone to sudden bouts of info dumping. Often, it would come as characters suddenly paused and “realized” what had been going on for the past 10 chapters and thought threw a whole chain of events. Or characters would suddenly start explaining things in-depth in a way that rarely felt natural. These info dumps served to inform the reader, but in a way that magnified the story's flawed structure.
Weeks created characters that I liked and magic systems that were interesting, but I didn't completely enjoy the books that contained the stories. I read Brent Weeks as an experiment. After concluding the experiment, I'm not sure I'll be reading more of his books.