“That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.” “No. But you can say that if you don’t do something different it’ll happen again, and again, and again, over and over until something changes the game.” “Like the protomolecule?” “It didn’t change anything,” Holden said. “Here we are, still doing all the same things we did before. We’ve got a bigger battleground. Some of the sides have shifted […]
Six books in, and still not a weak link to be found in the series
So, look. Typically in my reviews I go the very remedial route of talking about broad themes from the book, how well the characters and/or worldbuilding were developed, and I comment on the pacing and overall competence of the plot. If I am very lucky, something will stand out that either makes me want to rant, or go on a gushing squeefest, and I can write a better than milquetoast review. When you get to the sixth book in a consistently excellent series, there isn’t […]
A monstrous planetary romance.
Kicking off the year with an intense sci fi exploration of language and Language! Embassytown is a human colony/outpost on a distant planet Arieka—accessible only by a dangerous trip through some timey-wimey wishy-washy-space-travel stuff called the immer. The Ariekei live on Arieka and they communicate with Language: They can only speak literally, with a dual mouth that speaks in unison, and their intent must be known and match the words, or it has no meaning. They cannot lie; they cannot understand human language. So to speak with any creativity, […]
A tale of wheeled cities
“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in Spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” …And from that opening sentence on, I was hooked. In the distant future, in the aftermath of the Sixty Minute War which put paid to the world as we know it, a system called Municipal Darwinism arose. Evolving out of the need to dodge the volcanoes and earthquakes that rocked the earth following the war, mechanical cities […]