• Au­thor: Char­lie Jane An­ders
• Rat­ing: ★ ★ ★ ★
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Review:

Could be 4.5 stars may­be, even 5 for some­one who was more in­to this kind of thing.

Of course the com­pli­cat­ed part there is, what kind of thing is this?

* De­but nov­el, with the ex­pect­ed over­growth of ran­dom ideas that could be awe­some in a sep­a­rate book.

* Pup­py love.

* Apoc­a­lypse.

* Mag­ic vs. Tech­nol­o­gy (the mag­ic sys­tem could use a bit more de­tail, the tech sys­tem, if that is even a thing could al­so (where did the 2 sec­ond time ma­chines schemat­ics come from?)

* Love­ly writ­ing

Did I men­tion that Tech­nol­o­gy here feels more like a sep­a­rate school of mag­ic than what we IRL un­der­stand as tech­nol­o­gy? In some oth­er book (Wear­ing the cape, may­be?) I read about a sort of su­per­heros/­su­pervil­lains called "Verne" who were able to cre­ate ran­dom "tech­no­log­i­cal" giz­mos and ma­te­ri­als that de­spite look­ing sci­ence-based were in fact to­tal­ly im­pos­si­ble for nor­mal peo­ple to re­pro­duce. That's how some of the "tech" things in this book ap­pear to work, and I think it makes the book slight­ly more in­ter­est­ing to me: it's a book about a war be­tween two mag­i­cal fac­tion­s, where one of the fac­tions does­n't know what they do is mag­ic.

All in al­l, very solid, en­ter­tain­ing book.

• Au­thor: Lois Mc­Mas­ter Bu­jold
• Rat­ing: ★ ★ ★
• See in goodreads

Review:

It's a Vorkosi­gan book by Lois Mc­Mas­ter Bu­jold, so you know what you are go­ing to get:

* Puns
* Gen­tle prose
* Some jokes
* A sto­ry where the en­e­mies are or­ga­ni­za­tion­al and lo­gis­tic chal­lenges in a peace­ful en­vi­ron­men­t.

Ok, that last one is most­ly the case with the re­cent Vorkosi­gan book­s. Long gone are the in­ter­stel­lar in­trigues and space­ships fight­ing wach oth­er. Now? Our pro­tag­o­nists are faced with the fol­low­ing ques­tion­s:

¿What do I do with all this con­crete mix­er?

¿Should I ask her out, or is it go­ing to be weird be­cause she is the wid­ow of my ex-lover we use to have three­somes with and we are hav­ing com­pli­cat­ed 3-­par­ent ba­bies and tech­ni­cal­ly the re­gent of the plan­et where I am the top mil­i­tary au­thor­i­ty?

You know, that sort of book.

• Au­thor: Liu Cix­in
• Rat­ing: ★ ★ ★ ★
• See in goodreads

Review:

It's very good. It's al­so sur­pris­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to read be­cause of the miss­ing res­o­nance of the cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences. Sure, I know about Marie Curie, but what hap­pens when a char­ac­ter men­tions Wu Chien-Shi­ung "went even fur­ther than Marie Curie"? Sure, she went fur­ther be­cause she be­came a physi­cist af­ter Marie Curie died! Why is she even brought up?

Is that some in­her­ent chi­nese chau­vin­ism in the orig­i­nal tex­t? I have no idea, but I pre­fer to take it as an ex­tra op­por­tu­ni­ty: a nov­el about alien con­tact writ­ten by a mild­ly alien writ­er. Sure, a "re­al" alien would be much dif­fer­en­t, in fact it would prob­a­bly be un­in­tel­li­gi­ble to me. So this is the mild sub­sti­tute.

I liked it a lot.

• Au­thor: Hugh Howey
• Rat­ing:
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Review:

And I am done with this se­ries. Had to force my­self to fin­ish read­ing it, to be hon­est. Not that there's any­thing **wrong** with it, but it was just ... I don't know.

• Au­thor: Hugh Howey
• Rat­ing:
• See in goodreads