Shawn
A brilliant concept executed with real wit and invention, but one that kept me at arm’s length from start to finish.
The premise is immediately compelling: Charles, a robot valet, accidentally murders his master during the morning shave, and then — having no protocol for this — tries to complete the rest of his task queue anyway. He dresses the corpse, serves it dinner, attempts a seaside drive. It’s darkly funny and philosophically sharp, and Tchaikovsky uses it to launch a sprawling meditation on purpose, identity, consciousness, and the collapse of civilization.
The world-building is genuinely impressive. The journey from the manor to Central Services to an underground human farm to a mountain library to a robot army to God’s courthouse is inventive at every turn, and the satirical targets — bureaucratic paralysis, institutional decay, the violence of “probably guilty” justice — land with real precision. The Library sequence in particular is one of the cleverest things I’ve read this year.
My problem is the central one the book sets up for itself: when your entire cast explicitly cannot feel anything, it’s hard to care about them. I admired Uncharles. I respected the Wonk’s grief. But I never quite felt either of them. The novel asks you to root for characters who keep insisting there’s nothing to root for, and while that’s intellectually interesting, it made for an emotionally exhausting read.
If you love ideas-driven SF and don’t need warm characters to stay engaged, this is absolutely your book. For me, it was one I respected more than I loved.
A brilliant concept executed with real wit and invention, but one that kept me at arm’s length from start to finish.
The premise is immediately compelling: Charles, a robot valet, accidentally murders his master during the morning shave, and then — having no protocol for this — tries to complete the rest of his task queue anyway. He dresses the corpse, serves it dinner, attempts a seaside drive. It’s darkly funny and philosophically sharp, and Tchaikovsky uses it to launch a sprawling meditation on purpose, identity, consciousness, and the collapse of civilization.
The world-building is genuinely impressive. The journey from the manor to Central Services to an underground human farm to a mountain library to a robot army to God’s courthouse is inventive at every turn, and the satirical targets — bureaucratic paralysis, institutional decay, the violence of “probably guilty” justice — land with real precision. The Library sequence in particular is one of the cleverest things I’ve read this year.
My problem is the central one the book sets up for itself: when your entire cast explicitly cannot feel anything, it’s hard to care about them. I admired Uncharles. I respected the Wonk’s grief. But I never quite felt either of them. The novel asks you to root for characters who keep insisting there’s nothing to root for, and while that’s intellectually interesting, it made for an emotionally exhausting read.
If you love ideas-driven SF and don’t need warm characters to stay engaged, this is absolutely your book. For me, it was one I respected more than I loved.
Middlesex is a big, ambitious novel that earns its Pulitzer. Eugenides traces a single gene across three generations — from a Greek village in 1922 to Detroit to 1970s San Francisco — and somehow makes the whole thing feel personal rather than epic. The first half is mostly family backstory and requires some patience, but once Cal is on the page the book becomes hard to put down. The locker room scenes, the Obscure Object, Milton on the Ambassador Bridge, the final scene with Desdemona — it all lands. Impressive piece of storytelling.
Middlesex is a big, ambitious novel that earns its Pulitzer. Eugenides traces a single gene across three generations — from a Greek village in 1922 to Detroit to 1970s San Francisco — and somehow makes the whole thing feel personal rather than epic. The first half is mostly family backstory and requires some patience, but once Cal is on the page the book becomes hard to put down. The locker room scenes, the Obscure Object, Milton on the Ambassador Bridge, the final scene with Desdemona — it all lands. Impressive piece of storytelling.
This one surprised me. I expected a straightforward WWII rescue story and got something much richer — Ackerman writes like a naturalist, all sensory detail and close observation, and she uses that gift to build the prewar zoo world so vividly that when it gets destroyed you actually feel the loss. Jan and Antonina Żabińska are remarkable people, but what makes the book work is the small stuff: a badger using a training potty, a muskrat stuck in a chimney, a carnivorous attack rabbit named Wicek, a sculptor who hides from the Gestapo by running for the closet every time someone plays Offenbach. The weight of what the Żabińskis were doing never leaves — Hans Frank’s death decrees hang over every page — but Antonina’s insistence on filling the house with animals and music and humor is its own kind of argument about how to survive.
This one surprised me. I expected a straightforward WWII rescue story and got something much richer — Ackerman writes like a naturalist, all sensory detail and close observation, and she uses that gift to build the prewar zoo world so vividly that when it gets destroyed you actually feel the loss. Jan and Antonina Żabińska are remarkable people, but what makes the book work is the small stuff: a badger using a training potty, a muskrat stuck in a chimney, a carnivorous attack rabbit named Wicek, a sculptor who hides from the Gestapo by running for the closet every time someone plays Offenbach. The weight of what the Żabińskis were doing never leaves — Hans Frank’s death decrees hang over every page — but Antonina’s insistence on filling the house with animals and music and humor is its own kind of argument about how to survive.