Enno Rehling

This was funny space-opera stuff. After a plague turns them into zombies, healthy humans are an endangered species, our heroes are among the last survivors, working as janitors on an alien spaceship that they suddenly find themselves in control of. There are plenty of alien races with their own agendas, space battles to win, and a conspiracy to uncover.

I liked this book, but there was one aspect that spoiled my overall great impression: The “movie in your mind” dramatization of the audio book version. You wouldn't believe how much noise there is in space! At times it's hard to hear the characters speak over it, especially when there's dramatic music in the mix during the many action sequences.

After Playing for Keeps and Six Wakes, this is my third book by Mur, and I loved it just as much. The symbiotic aliens, the human characters, the setting and the murder mystery all hit a variety of my buttons. Did I read that this is going to be a series? Then I will definitely read the next books, as well as any others she's written that I can get my hands on over here.

I read this book with the intention to learn more about the revolution, and one of its most controversial figures, and I got that, but also a portrait of a man who lived (Spoiler: and died) for his ideals. How different would the Soviet Union have been if it hadn't been Stalin who won the internal power struggle? I'm glad to have learned more about the genesis of the Soviet Union, a topic that was very much absent from my school curriculum. Given how much I've read and watched about the end of it, this was a hole in need of filling, and this book helped.

There may be other books about the events and person of Trotsky, perhaps less biased ones, but this one is well-written and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in 20th century history.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In early victorian England, foreign translators at Oxford try to take on the empire, which works on a translation-based kind of magic that involves silver bars. Many times, we think it's all over for our protagonists, and they receive a miraculous rescue, it's quite gutting. Until at the end, they don't.

I liked it, the magic is very clever, the parallels to our real world are there, although events have been altered. There's still an opium war, an abolitionist movement, English exceptionalism and disdain for others, all the loathsome things that make up British Empire.

Loved it just as much as the previous two books that it builds on.

Notes:

New planets, new forms of alien intelligence.
The corvids were my favorite alien species in a while.
Are they a form of AI? Can AI be sentient? Are any of us? Questions that loom especially large this year.
Second book looking at the simulation hypothesis that I've read this year.
Liff's story is heartbreaking.
Decanting the swarm intelligence from book 2 into a single person named Miranda is a brilliant solution to the problem of how to address the “we”.
The eventual reveal again comes with a twist and a second, even better reveal. How does Tchaikovsky do this?

So much of this book is repetition, with Zoe explaining the same things about her and her past that she's already told us in the first two books, followed by dead-ends, that it's really only the final third of the book that anything happens. I like the characters and the story, but it seems like the action is being stretched thin across too many books.

Loved every minute. McGuire returns to the children of the first book, and continues their story in an adventure that spans several worlds, but also introduces us two some new characters. Time travel and non-linear timelines can get messy, but it's very well handled, as is the internal “logic” of the nonsense candyland that we spend most of our time in.

Highly recommended to anyone who loved the first book, especially if you loved it more than book two. Not quite a standalone book, you should at least read “Every Heart A Doorway” before you get into this one.

I think I am enjoying her Hainish Cycle SciFi books more than this fantasy novel, but that is probably purely a matter of personal preference. What spoke to me beyond the story was the world she builds, made up of many islands and dominated by the sea that connects them.

If I didn't know better, it would be possible to think that Eressea (the strategy PBEM) was influenced by this book, and it's made me want to start another game in a setting like this, with more magic and better rules for ships.

On my re-read of this turbo-capitalist dystopia, I no longer find it as poignant as I did the first time around. It's still a great book with an interesting world, in which government has to compete in the marketplace of rampant consumerism, but I wish there was more exploration into the history of this world, and how it ended up this way.

Even though this book doesn't feature Eleanor West's school for wayward children, it's of course still about a child who goes through a doorway to a magical realm like the others in the series. Regan loves horses, and her portal takes her to a world of centaurs and unicorns, where she tries to avoid her destiny as a hero and savior in favor of a life with a new family.

You should still read Surely You're Joking. This book does not replace it. In fact, it is based mostly on the same material, so if you've already read other Feynman books, you won't learn a lot of new things. But the art is good, and reading about Feynman this way is a fun way to spend the Sunday. This book makes a great gift for the nerd in your life who enjoys both science and graphic novels.