A fantastic first instalment that would probably be a five star read, had it not suffered a little bit from both feeling very much like the start of something, as well as been top heavy with a lot of exposition. In all other areas it excels. It is subversive of genre in many ways I like: framing and perspective changes, unique world building, extrapolating true history into the future in a much more organic and compelling way than most in the genre; characters are fleshed out and central.

Plot-driven readers will probably not like this much, as it’s fairly clear the plot mostly exists to examine core ideas placed in a speculation. Lots of deconstruction of social constructs take place as intersections with the various cast. It’s methodical and feels like a defining work. Naturally, I like works that do not conform to the commercial aspects of the genre, though, I also wouldn’t call it literary. Fantastical elements make this more of a kitbash. There’s no fan service and the tone and style is crafted in a classical sense. It’s a chimera, of sorts.

It all just worked for me, though. There were some sections that felt like awkward pacing, but the dynamics between characters were often so interesting, the fact that not much was progressing was elided because of the unreliable narrator. This is a history of sorts, told by a criminal who, in Lolita-esk style, points out his own logical fallacies without realizing it. Such as the a central framing device of antiquated references to gender, which he claims is necessary because of the “classical” style, written for “us”, the readers, but I don’t think we are never actually told who “we” are. And so, really, it communicates a lot about his personality that he weaves this capitalizing history while eschewing a main tenant of the society he is now charged with a kind of servitude, as punishment for his actions.

So much of the novel is engaging because of this tension between the excellent storytelling of the protagonist (though there are inserts from others and different structural and even language changes) and what information we acquire later, which recontextualizes, in some cases, everything we know to be happening, and what we know of individuals; especially the narrator. It’s just interesting, though probably a very polarizing reading experience. I will certainly be picking up the next. I was foolish to put them off for some long, having owned the first 3 for years now!

Much more fun and interesting than most of the stuff I picked up on peoples’ top comics last year. But this does suffer from a few things—most predominate? the world makes little no sense. I’m guessing this was a spider-verse spinoff, because it acts like explaining what the world is like has already been communicated.

It makes up for this by being expressly antifascist and has great art while doing it. At no point could I concretely say I knew what the factions were and how they functioned in the world at large. Norman Osborn was a president, guess he died? It looks and feels post apocalyptic, but is it? Music seems to be a much bigger deal, but I don’t know why. It’s very much a just nod your head and roll with it thing. Which is fine, but not amazing.

While the first book is more gripping simply because it’s more plot driven and has an intensely good hook, coupled to an intriguing narrator—the subsequent instalments have much more heady and slow moving. Very much a book of ideologues, made necessary because of the events of the first books, where society essentially collapses and factions must now, well, battle.

But there isn’t actually to many battles, which I doubt anybody would expect, anyway. These books have never focused on that aspect. Much more about the political intrigue and revelations based on context, than anything actually decided by a physical kind of conflict.

So, be warned then: This is slow moving, but just as methodical and just as big on twists and turns you probably won’t see coming. I have to be in a specific mood to engage with something like this. In the previous book I compared it to Dune, and I think that’s apt, though minus the battle sequences and add in confronting more social constructs than (primarily) religion. Though just as interested in questing for morality through a figure that literally embodies godhood (head).

3.5 rounded up

A fairly solid conclusion that continues the same tone and pacing, subject matter, and battle of ideologues as the last one. The first book is still absolutely my favourite, but the transition from that to a more methodically slow examination of the human condition is well done. If readers have made it this far I think they will enjoy it, but I can see “normal” sci-fi readership bouncing off of this series, as it is not remotely interested in delivering contemporary scifi payoff, imo. I liked that a lot about it, though. It poses big questions and isn’t afraid to follow them, despite them leading down some pretty intense scenes and revealing character flaws in everyone. There are a few darlings, but it still feels quite savage, relevant, and singular.

The last speech drove home a thematic nail that was pretty interesting to me; mostly because it acknowledges how humanity is wired and how it could be gamed into thriving, since both peace time and war time are fail states for the species. Spectacular fail states, actually. The conclusion about humanity and first contact also traces a through line that prompts and engages with very interesting questions.

In reviews, people call this a future history, which I think works well, since it’s in dialogue with history; especially it’s repetition. Patterning we can’t move past and habituate ourselves, making future generations susceptible to the same problems we face today. The casual cruelty in which our society functions regularly, and what is discernible to the average individual when society functions in that way, is one of the most vile things humanity replicates reliably in every civilization.

In a more classic vein of sci-fi, this series mines speculative questions and presents a plot to interrogate them. It won’t be for everyone, as I said, but it’s certainly for me. Very successful.

Fun and funny enough, and more of the same. Digestible but I doubt it blows anyone away. I think I liked the central tension from the previous book a lot more, as each conflict kept feeding back into the original. This was a lot more straight forward and shorter.

I recommend breaking up your listening to these, as the kinds of things the author finds funny are recycled into every book. Fry does an excellent job with this kind of humour though, making it never a chore to listen to. The grouping of the books is also well handled, with a kind of through-line emerging, despite skipping multiple books. It could stand to drop a book though, still. I imagine fans of the series will love this completely. As someone new to it and not all that into humour, I found it pleasant but by no means anything more than just fun. Nothing wrong with that.

Unsurprisingly, this unfinished book never really comes together. It’s experimental and interesting, easily digestible, concerned with modern modernity’s effect in man. It’s not that surprising that it’s seems well loved. Especially with the mammoth effect, where people seem to want to ascribe a lot more value to things they spend a lot more time on, and finish, like huge novels such as this.

Interestingly, my major gripes are similar to The Brothers Karamazov, which has similar very long-winded diatribes on philosophical notions. But the actual fiction suffers to it because the authors pay no mind to time and place during these many, many outings. Especially in regards to time, people will launch into speeches that would literally take hours upon hours to conclude, with generally no back-and-forth, and it’ll have been during the course of an appetizer. It becomes abundantly clear that this is even worse than all that, as this is less concerned with plot than other Idea books (certainly Brothers K, which has a large plot component, even if it’s overlong).

This is where the experimental components come in. Kind of like the newest effort from McCarthy, the path of the novel is more on a meta level, with the notions of certain things evolving. But they don’t actually get anywhere, because it can’t, as it’s not got an even remote conclusion. Nor would it have had had it been finished, because many of the concerns are questions that don’t have definitive answers. And the ones that do, the books one-note characters completely miss anyway. My favourite is when they talk on, what essentially amounts to moral relativism, as these authors seem to always want to do. As if there is no way to quantifiably see how morals work because they’re social constructs.

There are metrics that are very plain and easy, but always eschewed by people pontificating. Do your decisions, does your society, remove agency from other people? What is the disparity in wealth? What is the general health? How does it treat the disenfranchised? It’s not as though this was written in the medieval ages, it was begun in 1980s if I recall correctly. The characters going into the same musings and coming to shallow thoughts like they do is inexcusable for a book of ideas. It’s unsurprising that there’s a thick not of misogyny that runs through it as well, then.

The women are poorly written and the narrative constantly makes asides of poor conceived judgment on women and their so-called natures, with a laughable gesture at equality near the end when it shows them persecuted for having the same sex drive as a man, and being judged for it. Had it not been constantly undermined and dominated by male voices projecting their feelings as empirical evidence as to how women function, perhaps it would have been more palatable.

What’s more is that, unfortunately, it’s all very forgettable as well. The delivery is oiled well enough, but it’s hard to recall any conversation that makes a significant impact because there is no book-end to the delivery, nothing to ground the discussion or the idea to anything else. It’s a non-stop train where the discussions are nothing more than the trees a passaenger notices whipping by on the way to more trees upon trees upon trees. And the passenger never actually reached anywhere, so the trip is completely unmemorable.