Review

Not as good as enlightenment now on the state of the world, or something like thinking fast and slow about cognitive biases. The survey that the author presented at the beginning had few surprises for me (or to anybody who has lived outside of the developed world?), and the rest of the book seemed to be hypothesizing about why we believe things with little evidence for those hypotheses. I did like the simplifying paradigms like there being 4 levels of economic well-being, and the topic is a good one, so 3 stars overall.

Not as good as lock in, but I don’t think sports corruption would ever be that interesting to me. Worth reading though. Like it’s predecessor, characters and setting were more interesting than the mystery at hand.

It was OK. The book was entertaining enough to read, but no ideas will really stick with me more than a week after finishing.

My favorite scalzi book to date. Really liked the premise and the characters. The ending seemed a bit of a disappointment, but it was a fun ride to get there. Will continue this series.

Better than the first book in the series.

Not awful, not great. Snodgrass seems to do better in the confines of a school than describing the reach of an empire, but still a reasonable jet-lag read.

Felt like a mix between Embassytown and Ancillary Justice. Military Scifi set in a world where mathematics and calendar rituals enable fantastic technologies, but bullets still work. Perhaps because the rules of ’exotic’ calendric powers were never really explained, it was difficult to feel surprise at any of the twists, I just felt like I was watching a sport I didn’t fully understand. I don’t quite recommend it, but wasn’t disappointed either.

Entertaining. Very similar to Red Rising, with the lower class chip-on-his-shoulder male protagonist and royal princess classmate. Enough to convince me to read the sequel, not enough to make me want to read the series.

Disappointing. The first half of strong with a history of autonomous weapons, and a great taxonomy of the different types of autonomy, hinting at how the lines are both more blurry and more historic than I expected. With a strong setup, I was hoping for a cogent analysis of how the potential for increased autonomy via ML could change the economics or reality of warfare, instead the author gives a regurgitation of sci-fi tropes and overwrought philosophizing about the morality of autonomous weapons. Scharre convinced me that peacetime pontificating was not the most relevant line of inquiry after describing US moral reluctance to engage in submarine warfare, completely scrapped mere hours after Pearl Harbor. In government and private industry, I’ve watched years of careful thought scrapped when faced with the reality of defeat. ...

Didn’t get the hype. A pretty standard retelling of norse myths, felt kinda like reading a short story textbook more than anything else.