Mystery

**Decohere ** * Ubik—the only book that reads you as you read it. Side effects include narrative dissonance and ontological vertigo. * Do books need to make sense? Ubik certainly doesn’t. Supposedly that’s the meta point - a dream, or constructed reality always has seams the reader can pick at, Ubik just makes it more obvious. The core narrative is about surviving in half-life, and different minds collide and cannibalize. Yet, if the narrative is not even an attempt at coherence, what are we left with? Art? A dream? Why do we even read? Maybe Ubik is the diving board from which the reader should jump into more profound thoughts. I just fell into the abyss. ...

** Murder, Magic, Malaise ** If Romantasy is court intrigue with a swooning heartbeat, this is its jaded sibling: Mysterantasy—suspicious deaths, arcane trickery, and protagonists too tired to care. Din, a detective who’d rather not chase another corpse, moves through a world where power, like rot, is ambient. His weariness isn’t melodramatic. It’s the flat exhaustion of someone who’s seen too many patterns repeat. Solving murders feels increasingly pointless. The system remains: “And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist.” ...

Exactly what I want out of fiction. A well paced plot, a few characters to root for, and surprises that keep the story ahead of, or at least more complex than a readers lazy imagination. Recommended.

Fantasy Heist genre with characters interesting enough to keep turning the pages. Read it out of order, but the characters were interesting enough to encourage me to go back and finish it. 3.5 stars.

Mechanical writing, heavily foreshadowed plot, and multiple povs made this book highly soporific. Only one character had the right motive, making the twist less shocking. After falling asleep for the 8th time while reading, and abut 75% in, just skipped to the wiki summary.

Surprised it took me so long to get to this. Dead gods and a strong flavor of colonialism are good themes for fantasy. Good characters to explore the world, though I feel like the author assumes the population is a bit more miracle adverse than what would actually happen.

3.5 stars, great setting, solid writing. Somewhat disappointing characters and a predictable plot.

** Leviathan Deflates ** She was reaching for supernatural answers, when memory and mundanity were enough. * Frankly disappointing. Tiamat’s Wrath had managed to take what was good about the series and use the massive shared context with readers to satisfyingly increase complexity. Along with Winds of Winter, this was one of the books I was looking forward to taking time off work to inhale in a day. Unfortunately Leviathan Falls pairs back to the plot to a few main characters and a pseudo-science arc. ...

DNF Chapter 6.

** 43rd book of 2021: ** Fugitive Telemetry takes place in-universe between Exit Strategy and Network Effect (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3274092254) , making it effectively #4.5. As Wells’ plots increased complexity in Exit Strategy and Network effect, there were new facets to both Murderbot and the story that keep the boredom of repetition at bay. Without that added complexity, Fugitive telemetry feels like a rehash. The book starts with a body is found in Preservation Station, creating a murder mystery that Murderbot is far more capable than local station security to solve. But without other interesting characters to play off or threats that felt real, I found myself wishing I could go back to some reruns of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It’s tough to avoid crime thriller tropes in the space of a novella and to quote Murderbot* what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit. *