alan laird

Ringword as a bowl ?!?! YES, YES, and more YES!

Benford and Niven were great in this and it reminded me a lot of a Mote in God's Eye. Awesome....

Enjoyable space action story that was a fairly quick read. The characters felt a little thin and the plot seemed a bit obvious. The ending was underwhelming. Overall, a good book with some challenges that almost push it down to 2 stars for me. I enjoyed it however so lots of the book worked well for me.

It seemed like a great vacation read.

This novella was enjoyable like the author's other books but felt oddly packaged. I can't recall a novella that felt so much like a handful of chapters ripped from another book. The novella has little to do with it's description on Amazon and it's all very puzzling.

I see now that it's self-published and it makes sense.

Stross is completely nuts. Round the bend and mad as a March hare.

Power and money is the oldest story in the world and it's often the most real. Stretch this across space and you have Stross's very plausible fast, medium and slow money. Add concepts like historical forensic accountant nuns and you have the premise for what might be the best hard sci-fi book since Rule 34.

Like many sci-fi books, this is a mixture of big ideas and action. This book is heavily weighted towards big ideas and I kept pausing to think about little things that were just tucked into the narrative. You could blast past them to the next car chase but you'd be missing so much.

At some level folks are going to point to Altered Carbon which is a great military action series but the idea of the plasticity of the human form was mostly ignored there and is a gritty part of this world.

These characters live in a post-human world but they still have very believable drives.

Nice solid military scifi with a lot of pages borrowed from Starship Troopers and modernized a bit.

update:
I'm not sure I would classify it as scifi any longer. It's primarily military fiction.

Great science fiction detective novel. I'd recommend this to lots of people. The science fiction aspects are interesting but it's a murder mystery at heart and well paced.