Dan
Book: 3/5 stars
Series: 4/5 stars
This book should not exist. So little happens, so much is padded with meaningless blabbering.
There are dialogues with one line per page, filled with the authors, sometimes nonsensical, blabbering in between. It's a pity such an awesome series ends in such an unsatisfying way.
The explanations given are chaotic, illogical and just hand waved away.
The prose got to me at the end, in a bad way. The first 2 books were stuffed with so much awesomeness that the weird prose did not bother me too much but once you are left with not much story and just the prose, that is often hard to comprehend, it gets old quickly. Had to force myself to read through it.
Overall it was not a ‘bad' book, it just pales in comparison to the first two books which are masterpieces.
Still one of the best series I have read in the last years. Would recommend.
This one was terrible. I liked the first one, but this is just bad. Hardly any exploration of the amazing world, only petty storylines with no reason to be there other than to produce a thicker book.
Naiv politics, boring main story arc, uninterresting new characters. My suggestion is to kill it with fire.
As with most modern books, this should be shorter.
Why are we spending so much time in this book not exploring the cool scifi concept but petty squabbles between petty humanoids?
I think I just do not like Mr. Tchaikovsky writing style, he is the kind of author that spreads out a 5 line dialogue over 6 or 7 pages. One line of dialogue followed by 1.5 pages of meandering and internal monologue until the second line follows and so on. At the end you do not know what the dialogue was about. That happens multiple times in the book. And then there was this infuriating scene where one of the main chars makes a discovery about the main plot and everyone around him knows about it but we, the readers, do not get to learn about it until chapters later and until then they go running around “but this important thing we learn is important and we need to tell” “but what we learnedness to get out”, “isn't it awesome what we learned, so mind boggling” and in the end it turns out to be underwhelming. It's so cheap.
Overall the concept, the world, the aliens are all great, I am just not a fan of the execution.
This is hard to rate, on the one hand the actual story, when it happened, was fantastic, on the other hand much of this book was world building which was done in a, for me, boring way. The usual stereotypical ‘ragtag group of' space pirates/smugglers/traders/scoundrels but with a heart of gold goes through boring pirates/smugglers/traders/scoundrels stuff and we learn about the world in the process. You have read that in a 100 books a 100 times before. But the world, the universe, is fantastic with a rich history and multiple alien races and it just feels real.
Looking forward to book 2
This book has a lot to say about AI, slavery, consciousness, gender and much more.
Unfortunately it does it in the most boring, most unlogical way possible. The plot can only happen in the way it does because everyone involved acts in a way no one would ever act. There are parts of the book where you know exactly what is going to happen, because you have read this all before, done in better ways from others authors yet you slog through the pages only to be surprised how unoriginal that all is.
Instead of exploring the vast multiverse with its many wonders and species we get treated to pages and pages of the boring and sad lives of the unlikeable protagonists.
Skip this one. Read ‘The Long Earth' instead or watch Sliders.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
This was a miss, basically one big battle scene mostly of boring one on one battles.
Don't get me wrong, the author does battles very well but if the whole book only consists of battles it gets old very fast.
2.5/5 stars
I don't know. It's just as meaningless as RA and AG.
Read Revelation Space, skip the other books.
2/5
If you are looking for answers, look somewhere else because this book does not give you any. Most threads stay unresolved, the book has no ending, it just stops mid story.
There are a few great ideas in the book and the series but are just not explored while it focuses on mundane tasks and human bs.
Read book 1, skip 2 and 3.
I hope inhibitor phase is not such a slog.
3.5/5 stars
Took a long time to get interesting, like 2/3 of the book. Not that the first two thirds were boring, far from it, it just felt as if it was going nowhere, Tanner was just stumbling from one situation too. the next.
Could/Should have been shorter.
Would have DNFed if I was reading it as a book and not as an audiobook.
For me, there was too little there. It was like ‘Dragon's Egg' by Robert L. Forward but done worse and bloated for no reason. The human part of the story could have been left out completely and the book would have been better.
4 stars for both the book and the series. Did not quite reach the magic of malice but was way better than Ruin.
It does show a bit, imho, that this was the author's first series and for that it's phenomenal. Bought the followup series, looking forward to it.
That book just does not work.
Solving all of world's major problems in 600 pages or less, I don't think so.
How to solve climate change? Obviously with help of a blockchain.....
The first half was ok, the second was a boring turd. Imagine reading the captains log of the Enterprise while cartographing some asteroids and calculating the course to the next. What a waste of a good idea
