I enjoyed the book and liked the concept quite a bit. Even the structure was engaging. It just failed to grip me and keep my interest apart from that because a lot of chapters focused on mundane aspects of Roger and Dodgers lives.
It skips around so often that I just never got attached to the characters and got my pleasure from the overarching story, which was cool. Sadly didn’t blow my expectations away as it seems to have done for everyone else.

Slow, rhythmic pacing with something meaningful in the character work and overarching plot. Packed full with a lot of small moments that really make the book. It’s not what I would call “exciting”, but it’s surprisingly impactful at the end of it all.

Once again a straight forward plot with an interesting idea that makes up the equivalent of a twist, kind of? Philosophical components and some dialogue interactions are the most interesting elements. The actual plot is deceptively simple for the page length. Not that much actually happens. It’s there to further the things being explored. But so far the second book did both much more masterfully than any of the others, in my opinion.

The problem with these notions being explored is that, while very interesting, their foundation shows distress in modern times. So many sociological components are outdated and when it demonstrates this, one wonders what else is prone to collapse. An army of bi/lesbian warriors without a voice.

Queerness as a cultural component is completely misunderstood and miscontextualized. It doesn’t feel like this could possibly be the future in any real sense because the only firm things it holds in its grasp is philosophy. Meanwhile for thousands of years people take drugs and have orgies and the most powerful weapon is a lasgun. And they display no awareness whatever of gender roles beyond the role ascribed by the empire.

As people, they lack compelling aspects. As cogs working to propel the plot and the exploration, they’re nearly perfect. But how much value is that when without this withholding of selfhood? Something great always deters this fiction from complete enjoyment, immersion, and ‘greatness’, for lack of a better term.

While it clips along like the previous two, and the characters are alright, the plotting is especially contrived in this one. It feels like a bunch of ideas that don’t really mesh or communicate anything thematically are mashed together. It started out pretty interesting but doesn’t really tie up either of the main plot points well despite both having elements that, had they been more fleshed out, been way more satisfying plot beats. Gotcha ending bugged me as well.