Reviews and Comments

i think i'm too overwhelmed to really write anything about this book rn, it's too much. spätestens ab der hälfte war ich auch nicht mehr wirklich ausreichend aufnahmefähig (there is so, so much going on in this text, and my memory not nearly good enough to keep all strands in my head at once)

this is probably the only sci-fi work i have ever read which has a solid page of text entirely in latin (and then has the gall to make that horribly weird latin, since most of it was presumably added three-words-a-time over centuries, for complicated in-universe regions)

where's my mycroft :/

This book has been recommended by an uncommonly disperate set of people; curious to see what that is about

as already mentioned, this book is just so much

found this lying around on the street & thought it might be interesting

annoyingly, this book is still in the category of "almost everything i could possibly say about it has at least essay-length", and i don't have the time or motivation to write essays 🙈

a fun side observation tho: it moves slowly, not in the sense that i'm on page 155 and it's barely evening of the second day described, but in that reappearing characters usually reappear exactly where they were left before the narration switched focus on someplace else, and there are absolutely no "they did $things in the meantime"-passages anywhere — everything is part of the main trunk of the narration grinding along at dizzying (but slow) speeds, without ever taking a moment for breath (while Mycroft repeatedly hits you on the head with the entire canon of 'western' philosophy, and being unnecessarily horny about it all)

Haven't read much so far, but god have i missed Mycroft's voice, he's so absurdly, obnoxiously, incomprehensibly derangend in absolutely every word he writes; i keep having fun imagining what one of his actual readers would think, since he's explicitly writing this for publication soon after the events he's describing

(i'm kinda anxious about how much i like i'll like these books this time overall though — been years since i read this, and i might disagree with Ada more now than I did before, but we'll see)

I'm at the end! This book really has no right to be anywhere near this good.

There's a sequel which I didn't find as good last time, but maybe I should read it again? But perhaps take a break from this and read something else first.

This is a fun one, in a way, but I'm not sure I'd call it good? There's a fun idea (a videogame-like "save and reload" function for real life, introduced by an all-powerful company) and what I think is a fun if somewhat obvious message (sth like "aim at making the right choices, but don't obsess about past wrong choices, and have the confidence to do so")

Or at least, I can only really read it as a metaphor; I had real trouble suspending disbelief enough to accept that this world would work as the story requires it to — it feels like a morality tale ruminating on what makes a (single) person good, and less like a sf story exploring how the ostensible premise (i.e. the save-and-reload technology) would shape the society within which it exists.

For some reason, whenever I read the name Thirty Larkspur, I assume he is a women and get confused about the pronouns in the following few sentences

dunno why, his seems to be the only teixcalaanli name that feels this intuitively 'gendered' to me

I don't think I understood this one at all (at least partially because of language issues, but also does this ever have a lot of moving parts for a 25-page story)