Rob

It's been a while (3.5 years) since I listened to Heaven's River, so my memory of the characters and where things left off was fuzzy. I did mostly get back into things after a bit without feeling the need to look for recap.

The book was enjoyable enough that it kept my attention, but it also sort of felt like a bit of a transition book. There were like 4 main plot lines, and all of them felt like setup for more books. I'm good with that, I'll read more books.

I thought it ended in a fine place where I'm looking forward to the next book but not going to be impatient for it to come out. There are lots of loose threads but nothing I'd call a cliffhanger.

Audio narration was fantastic as usual. Ray Porter is excellent.

I first heard about this book thanks to an article on Ars Technica. What I found strange was it was the time I heard anything about this. Given the timing (2020-21) of the bulk of the story though, it's not too much of a surprise. I had other things on my mind back then.

I've read a lot of computer history and cybercrime books. I find the topic fascinating. This book is really more about more traditional crime (drugs, guns, money laundering) with a technical aspect (encrypted phones). From a technical perspective I didn't enjoy this as much as other books, but it's still a fascinating story.

It poses a lot of issues as technology and specifically encryption techniques continue to evolve how do you balance our right to privacy against the needs to prevent crimes? I don't have any answers and this book doesn't attempt to answer that question. What it does it instead is to tell a fascinating story that seems like it's right out of a movie.

I think this could turn into a great documentary or possible a movie, but it's probably not flashy enough for the latter. Staring at computer screens reading messages is not exactly big screen cinema. Overall though I found this a great read.

I generally pick up every new John Scalzi book as it comes out, and the Old Man's War series is largely the reason why. I really enjoyed the world he built and the characters that inhabited it.

It's been 10 years since The End of All Things was released, so my memory of things was pretty bad. It seemed like a re-read of Zoe's Tale in particular might have been a good idea. That said I didn't feel lost and there was enough background provided in this book for me to pick up without re-reading any of the previous books.

I really enjoyed the main protagonist (who I guess was a character in Zoe's tale?), Gretchen Trujillo and her assistant Ran. The book has the usual Scalzi banter and a fast paced plot that is light on the science.

The book is self contained but certainly seems to be set up for more books in the series, which I'd welcome.

For a while John Scalzi was one of my favorite sci-fi authors. Anytime a new book a pre-order was automatic. However I was mostly underwhelmed by his last two novels The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain. Both had fun sounding premises and both didn't end up being as fun as their premise.

So here comes this book about the moon turning to cheese. In the afterword Scalzi mentions how its the final book in what he sort of considers a loose trilogy of unrelated books. I was staring to think that maybe I'd be more selective of which novels by Mr. Scalzi I'd pre-order in the future.

Thankfully this was a book that ended up being as fun as the premise. If you're looking for a hard sci-fi novel, well you must not have read a John Scalzi novel before. The science is hand wavy at best. But that' not the point.

I'm not generally a fan of short stories. This book is almost that, but not quite. Some characters we meet once and never again. The book explores a lot of ideas, characters and parts of the US with the question of "how would they react if the moon turned to cheese?". It's a silly premise and question, but somehow it leads to some really interesting vignettes that worked well together into a novel length story.

Despite my somewhat low expectations and a style of story telling I generally don't enjoy, Mr. Scalzi somehow pulled it off.

Wil Wheaton does his usual good job with narrations. This book has far less snark than other books by Mr. Scalzi but I still think Wil is always a great fit for his novels.

Executive Summary: Just as I was starting to really enjoy this book, it turned again and I was just happy to be done with it. That kind of sums up my feelings on the series as a whole too.

Audiobook: The audio is honestly the best part about this. It's fantastic. If you're going to do this book/series, audio is definitely the way to go. Once again you get a full cast, and their are fantastic.

Full Review
I wanted to like this series more, but it just kept letting me down. It's not bad, but based on how many people whose opinions I trust liked it, I expected to like it more. I'm not sure if it's because I'm too old to read this, or if I just fundamentally disagree with some of Mr. Pullman's ideas or what.

I was hoping/expecting a fun series. What I got instead was often frustrating and depressing. I'm not in the school of belief about sugarcoating everything for kids, but this almost seemed to shove the notion that life isn't fair down their throats. Unless you lie. Lying will get you ahead. This book did finally have some consequences for lying, but not nearly as much as their should be. It seems to glorify lying.

Oh and religion is awful and anyone who believes in it is awful too. I'm not even religious, but I have many friends who are, and they wouldn't be my friends if they weren't great people. The level of preaching present in the last two books ramped up to a whole other level.

The part that I liked the best was the middle, and the traveling to the land of the dead. I thought that was a really cool idea. This series had a lot of really cool ideas, but the execution of them just didn't work for me.

The book, like the series wasn't all bad, I think my high expectations played a role in my being pretty underwhelmed. I'm glad I finally read it, but it's not something I'm going to recommend people go out of their way to pick up.