tfp
This was a fascinating look at the academic world of translation... with magic shoehorned in so that we could turn off a switch at the climax rather than writing an effective ending to the action.
I would have rather seen this treated as an exploration of bureaucracy, political intrigue and guerrilla warfare to effect a change in the world... rather than an alternate history with nothing changed beyond “there's magic!”
Was this a metaphysical discussion about morality, ethics and seeking a higher state of being...
Or is it a schlocky, pulp sci-fi novel with robots, lasers and a sentient computer?
Seriously, what the hell was the final third of this book?! And this was the planned end of the series?!
Awfully boring book. The nature of the spy craft was interesting, but it was a lot of “let me tell you what happened” and not much showing. The “action” scene descriptions were rather dull and incoherent
Great read, nice story and good resolution. Yeah it has some problems, but take it as it is: a horror novel written by a Western author. Not a ethnographic piece of how wonderful Calcutta is
I found the ending to the book and the series unsatisfying... not in that it was bad, but that I wanted more.
I think this is a great overview of how the modern internet works to filter and manage content. If you work in the space and you know how this stuff works, there's nothing groundbreaking.
I enjoyed the tail section about DJs and the last vestiges of human-led curation.
I would have liked to see an exploration of the rise and fall of modern internet human-curated sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. There are still convergences and flattening of culture as power is concentrated (c.f. u/GallowBoob).
A nice counterpoint might be yCombinator's hackernews which is intentionally slower, manually moderated and strictly enforced community guidelines.
Post-publication of this book, we've also seen a rise in burgeoning, decentralized social networks like Mastodon, Lemmy or similar platforms-as-a-service creating their own niche communities
Fairly contrived ending third for a series that was awfully redundant throughout. How many times can our heroes get locked in a dungeon and saved by a deus ex machina?
I think the end result was a fine trajectory for the series, but the twists, crosses, double crosses and reveals were too much for me to bear.