Book Reviews

**No Lasting Impression ** It’s harder than expected to write a review of Islington after a few months. I certainly remember the main characters, but like paint after too much mixing, all the characters have bled together into a brown shade of grim determination. With sufficient time travel and interwoven plots, it’s difficult to even tell the books apart. Much of the book is rereading the same story from a new vantage in time, with the reader adding pieces to previous knowledge, rather than navigating a new plot. The extended sequences in a purgatory-like time capsule were my favorite part of the book, if only to escape the steadfast drumbeat of sacrifice, speeches, and pontifications on free will. Overall passable, but didn’t leave an impression. ...

** Death by Detail ** What was the renaissance, and what caused it? Read something else if you want to find out. 4500 pages into the Story of Civilization, Durant departs from sweeping epochs to the comparatively tight focus on 100 years of Italian history. After *Age of Faith * which covered nearly 1000 years of history, I assumed that Durant’s specific focus in Italy implied specific import to the story of civilization. But like a meandering joke without a punchline, Durant never explained the context, origins, or uniqueness of the period. After countless vignettes, it seems the only thing special about the renaissance was the willingness of wealthy patrons to spend on art: ...

**99 Names of Caeden ** Certainty is hubris […] it is arrogance and Bluster. * Like most trilogies, Islington has the unenviable task of setting up a broader story within the reasonable confines of the first story and for higher stakes. He lands it… mostly. In our world of magic oligopoly, the characters are limited but the plots many. This means that an Echo of Things to Come uses every literary trick possible to squeeze a maximum number of revelations out of its few characters. Time travel, amnesia, partial amnesia, disguises, deception and miscommunicated names all play their role in the gears of Islington’s mythology. These tricks mostly land, but by the end I was seeing a new alias for an old character behind every chapter heading.

placeholder Good intentions don’t work, but mechanisms do.

** Fantasy Soup ** When it comes to fantasy, the author can chose different gini coefficients for magic-power distribution. Egalitarian powers aren’t fun, so few write such stories. It class based magic systems, an entire section of the population has magic powers, like the jedi of Star Wars or the wizards of Harry Potter. Islington chooses the most unequal distribution of all: a magic oligopoly, where a few named characters each have special powers in a nearly explicit hierarchy. Similar to wuxia novels, only a few of the characters are introduced in the first book to save the reader headache, and a self contained plot begs for sequels. ...

** Wonder in Incomprehension ** There was nothing in the laws of the universe that said Atevi had to have human attributes, or respond when humans tried to attach to them in human ways. * One of the great disappointments about western Scifi as a genre is its inability to imagine beings or cultures different than the western context bubble we live in. This makes Foreigner a breath of fresh air, one in which differences between beings are confusing, unsettling, and omnipresent. ...

**Aliens are Invading! But First, Tea ** *There is nothing more dangerous than politics without information. * A book about politics and diplomacy should be my jam. After the events of Foreigner, the human spaceship makes contact with both human colonists and Atevi aliens, creating opportunities for tripartite negotiations and treachery on all sides. In Invader, Atevi characters continue to become more familiar, while the humans both in the spaceship and Mospheira become inscrutable. This might be the first book where pacing was a real issue for me. Cherryh teases interesting events and character interactions yet I’ve seen glaciers advance faster than Cherryh writes the plot. Most pages are filled with talk of tea service and potential assassination attempts. Of course nothing happens during teas service or assassination attempts, just discussion about seating arrangements at the next one. After enough iterations, even real assassination attempts and tea service get boring. In Baghdad when a rocked would explode, it wasn’t even worth getting up for. ...

** Everything Store -> Everything Platform ** It’s easy to get caught up in the impact that Amazon as a company has had on American politics. Lina Khan is now the FTC advisor, candidates like Bernie Sanders use Amazon as a punching bag for all that is wrong with tech and American inequality. Yet in the last 5 years, the impact of Amazon as a business has been far greater. Perhaps unique among FAANG businesses, Amazon has reinvented itself, growing by leaps and bounds in the process. Stone describes the differences between his first book and today succinctly: ...

**Origami Permutations on Wealth ** Origami was never about the finished product. For me, it was the act of folding, taking an inert shape and transforming it into something unrecognizable, and doing so through crisp folds neatly executed. The Chosen and the Beautiful feels like Origami. Nghi Vo takes the story and material of Great Gatsby but folds it differently, with just enough wrinkles to keep a reader spellbound. Rather than tell the story from the perspective of the cardboard cutout Nick, Vo focuses on Jordan Baker: queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers. Vo captures the spirit of cultural unease lyrically: Being a guest suited me […] and as I went along I was turning into a marvelous mimic. I copied the Featherstone’s polished manners, the Banner’s midatlantic accent, and the Wilkens easy command of those they deemed their social inferiors, which was to say, everyone. I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was. I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity. ...

**$10b buys a good story ** The more advanced the civilization, the longer its lawsuits. Getty Oil is about capitalist and legal sausage making. For capitalism, acquisitions show a system’s ability to transfer ownership of one fictional to another to reasonably allocate resources among competing projects. From a legal perspective, tying up loose ends to satisfy a myriad of stakeholders shows a system capable of working through edge cases and getting to at least the perception of procedural fairness. But every mechanism increasing specialization and complexity introduces risk. Eventually something blows up. ...