Troy Pavlek

Great name for a book.

The way these books manage to make me care so fully about the guest-starring robots and not at all about the humans is A+

You could say this book was ART.

It's hard to grapple with the idea that this was quick and fun, an asset, but also left some of the more interesting ideas and beats unexplored.

Hopefully the next ones dig deeper.

I'm not sure a book that makes me think "oh, it looks like the Nazi was a pretty good guy, I guess!" is a timely and helpful book at this particular moment in history.

But here we are, and the book did what it did masterfully.

Overall I would call this book a "slog".

The first novel is great, an absolute page-turner and I think functions well enough as an independent work. I wish I hadn't read the followup.

There are so many interesting concepts and story threads in the book, just enough to keep me reading when most of the chapters made me want to put it down. That's the slog.

DNF

When people tell me this is a great story with great characters, I believe they're being honest with me.

But like most old literature, I found the characters flat, the dialogue tedious and reading a slog. I gave up.

Reading this book I'm reminded of the rule "don't show your character's expertise". When you tell me a character is a great comedian, I believe you. When you tell me the audience was dying laughing I believe you.

But when the character tells a joke and it's not funny it makes you go "Hm".

Overall the book was pretty fine. I was entertained, generally.

As someone who has argued a lot on Twitter... This book has far too much realistic arguing on Twitter.

It was not a pleasant escape, it was a reminder of hell.

It's nicely written, but does require you to not really think too hard about anything.

This world appears to forget that, sometimes, people need to go to the bathroom.

Also, if I had a magic invisibility power and 300 years, I'd probably do something more interesting than sleep with some people and steal a few clothes.

A much better book than the previous one. I thought this was the last one, and then getting to the last hundred or so pages I was like "oh no this is not close to finished".

I'll read the last one.

"Somehow, he Survived": The Novel.

I think this is probably the weakest entry since the first one. There's a lot of good here, but it's very long and if I wanted to spend what felt like several thousand pages in a desert, I'd have read Dune.

Five stars because I enjoyed reading it. It's not without flaws. It's definitely a bit slow, and the threads take a bit too long to connect.

It definitely does that annoying thing where you'll get a lot of names thrown at you, but like 90% of them will die so is it even worth learning those names? Definitely plot armour is not very strong, so that's an asset.

Book ends very much setting up the next, so if the rest of the trilogy doesn't deliver, that'll suck.

I don't think I'd call this a book. It doesn't really have an ending (nor does the next one). The trilogy is one continuous story without separation. Probably could have saved on covers by just putting it all in one. Basically has to be read that way anyway.

And it's pretty good, but I'm not interested in reading the word "silver" ever again, thank you.