Reviews and Comments

"Let’s be honest here, debt is a mechanism of social control. That’s one point Singer makes over and over again, which he didn’t have to work too hard to convince me of: clades believe heavily in repaying your debts to the family, and they weaponize that ethos. Emotionally speaking. Guilt is a currency."

"You can’t build an emotionless, rational, decision-making machine, because emotionality and rationality aren’t actually separate—and all those people who spent literally millennians arguing that they were, were relying on their emotions to tell them that emotions weren’t doing them any good."

"This has nothing to do, of course, with either Connla or me having a tendency to shrug into Singer’s skin and pretend to be a space ship ourselves. Definitely not while making vroom noises."

Great if you like reading about the cafeteria. There is barely any technical detail in here and instead it’s more of a travelogue and description of engineers.

Better than I thought it would be. Still very space opera.

This is a book set in the future, where the ecosystem is slowly collapsing and everyone is pretty sure that humanity is fucked in the long term. In this world, Laurence and Patricia, two young nerds, are bullied in school, confide in one another, and are quietly nursing fantasies of saving the world. Oh, and in this world magic is real, sort of like Brakebills only less dysfunctional.

The problem is that seers keep having visions that show that Patrica and Laurence are the ones who fuck things up completely.

I really liked this book for being so clear about large scale systems collapse and what it's like to live in San Francisco where you can have all the technology but there's a coffee shortage, and what it's like to live in a world where magic exists but can't fix anything.

It was fine. It is very clearly a WW2 story that is in space rather than anything alien or future based. Think Battlestar Galactica.

This is one of those books where the action sequences deliver, and you can actually believe in the team. It reminds me a bunch of early Culture novels, only instead of force fields and minds, you have magic shields and contracts tying everything together, like in the Craft Sequence but with spaceships.

Ironically, having magic be explicit with spaceships goes a long way to making the space opera more realistic in my mind, since there's no point handwaving with FTL drives and the like. It's magic. Deal with it.

My only gripe is that the villains are too villainous. I don't think anyone really talks about themselves like that.

It told me to make a tomato puree out of four tomatoes. No experienced chef believed me when I told them this.