competencefantasy's Reviews (912)

My favorite part of this book is the way it carries off the multiple view characters. They are each presented as morally complex, if not grey, and in their own way they are each potentially likeable to the reader. As a result, the political complexities and psychology of the situation come through when the stories are juxtaposed. Since my favorite part of political intrigue historical fiction is observing the different actors and considering how each person may have believed they were acting reasonably, this book sat very well with me indeed.

This book shows its age, especially when it comes to gender issues.

That ending needs so much help.

However, I can't seem to shake the feeling that even with problems that I would be tearing apart any book younger than my mother for, the story is actually salvageable. With a little bit of adaptation to ease up the awkward parts, there's a good archetypal story and some solid imagination under there. Fortunately, the prose holds up well too.

There's a certain subgenre, based on the near future of the now past, where all governments are based on thought exercises from a philosophy class, and, despite everything reverting to some form of dystopian totalitarianism long before the book got started, everyone has masked their cognitive dissonance so thoroughly that they still believe they're applying the principles of their belief system correctly. In this type of story, things are grungy and depressing, no one seems to remember how a 101 level college course got put in charge of everything, and despite barely mentioning communism, no one is over it.

This is a Shakespeare parody. A very funny British humor style Shakespeare parody.

This anthology is a bit of a unique case. Its contents were contributed by authors in the speculative fiction community to help its editor pay for medical bills. For this reason, it's a little more overflowing and grabbag than its competition might be. Here you'll find alternate universes, deleted scenes, experimental short works, that story your favorite author had always been meaning to write, and the one they needed an excuse to finish. There's a bit of something for everyone, which tends to mean there's a bit of something that's not for everyone too. I would recommend this to anyone who sees a favorite author on a list and wants to see what they would whip up to sell for a good cause.

It wasn't until I got to "The Sun and I" that I had an inkling where this collection was going. Even so, I'm not sure that I get it. The themes begin to stick out though. Intention doesn't matter, the work postulates, and certainly the protagonists have the worst of intentions. They are boring self-serving often academic profbros, who care intensely about their professional reputation but have long since lost any curiosity or fire about their actual work. From these cynical and annoying people, clever plots often manage to twist their way out, and the writing is amusing at times in a wry sort of way. Unfortunately it does get formulaic. The protagonist has a fading career, they do something unethical for the sake of prestige or stability, but the naive people are bad at helping and the cynical people are incompetent at harming. Somehow it all gets turned around. It gets to the point where you suspect that any plagiarism or forgery will turn out to be the genuine article and then, while the twist end may well be clever, it's not much of a twist anymore.

Additionally I have no idea what the essays are doing here. Their tone and pace seems strange for this format, and I pictured them instead being read out over a series of funny photos in a youtube video. That's not to put them down, after all many fine things have been taught on video, but in the short story anthology they were just strange. Finally the role of women in this work isn't the most forward thinking. While I understand that the author was creating an environment similar to the slimy halls of academia that I am so familiar with in my everyday life, if one is going to manufacture a world with such gross gender problems, to the point where the protagonists are telling the audience what the problem with women is or female magic users have different, later manifesting, abilities than men which may be affected by whether the woman has had sex, one really ought to do something with it and not just have it there as sleazy window dressing. We never have a woman protagonist for a change, or even a well developed minor character who isn't more than a plot device.

Are you looking for a novel in which a young person with no expectation of political power is suddenly put in charge of a country and needs to figure out everything from political alliances to daily minutia, all while keeping an exhausting set of appointments? Do you care who the political appointments are and what order he takes his audiences? If that is your thing, this book will really be your thing. I found that this book had a very soothing comfort food quality from my point of view. It sometimes made me drowsy, but not because I was bored. It was just that relaxing. It does seem to me that the book ends up being strangely pro benevolent monarchy in it's political themes, as a result of the resolution of one of the center plot lines and the choices of its protagonist. There are also a lot of proper nouns here. Seriously, take however many proper nouns you were expecting and double it. To some extent, how much you like this book may come down to how many proper nouns you were hoping for.

The mystery parts did get interesting at the end, but the middle sections of the book in particular were so tropy. I did not enjoy the main character, and many of the minor characters seemed to be written solely in a way to justify his dislike of them. There's just a little bit too much contempt floating around, and I didn't find the disaffected annoyance that interesting as a character concept. Also the elements of religious abuse and violence against women seemed to just be there for the sake of it, rather than for thematic exploration or out of necessity.

This is not for me at all. In typical post apocalyptic fashion, the world as we know it ends. How? All of the ways, it would seem. It's a cold war anxiety grab bag. Radiation poisoning, mass fertility failings and plagues across every species ever, political fragmentation, and shortages of earth elements, for some reason. Through all of this one family is somehow smart enough to come up with the only working survival plan and maintain some degree of reproduction through cloning in a little isolated commune, but they aren't smart enough to realize that in this situation life is expensive and it is therefore not a great idea to kill off or make into an object any person who feels a touch of mental illness or has an independent thought. For, as it turns out, the problem with cloning in this book is that people are almost entirely derived from their genetic material, and cloning therefore produces copies with no desire for self determination or individualism. From there, it's not hard to see where it's going. Of course a person or two accidentally acquires a mind of their own, of course this sets up some larger conflict between society and the individual, and of course we get to debate whether the longing for self determination is a trait required to be fully human. I realize that a lot of this was less predictable back when the novel was written, but I don't find these lines of questioning particularly edifying or nuanced here. So there we have it, another post-apocalyptic book that I do not like.

I love the premise of this one. Current day Western historical fiction has a bit of a fascination with Rome, but rarely writes from the point of view of their enemies. I would love to read more work in this vein. So, I'm somewhat confused that the book itself wasn't more engaging for me. I think the problem is one of pacing and scope. The military campaign described took place over several years, and this results in the book occasionally dropping into a tone that feels very much like a summary, reading more like nonfiction telling than dramatized showing. The result is a long book that still sometimes feels like it's rushing. A novel about Carthage doesn't have the topical popularity English-language books about Rome or medieval Europe have, and therefore can't assume that the reader will have a reliable sense of the timeline.

That said, the characters were interesting, vivid, and diverse. The narrative is very masculine, full of the siege and sacking of cities and the like. Note that this does include descriptions of sexual violence, torture, and violence against children, which is not unexpected given the subject matter, but proceed at best discretion.