I probably blasted through this too fast, but enjoyed it. I’ll be reading the series. I appreciated the commentary on translation, the first person AI perspective, and the gender ambiguity, although the empire felt too close to the Chronicles of Riddick, and the Presger seemed a lot like the Consu from Old Man’s War.
I didn’t really enjoy this book. There’s so much going on, but nothing had depth, and even the plot didn’t make it far. The politics felt shallow, written mainly in the service of plot. The genderless bias was interesting, but half of the characters were breaking the rules, so maybe they weren’t really rules to begin with. The science fiction aspects felt tacked on and surface level. The narrator interjections started out interesting, but ended up tedious. The theological / existential questions may have been the most interesting parts of the book, but they never went anywhere.
Mystifying in the way good scifi should be. More fun to think about than it was to read, but so many good ideas! Also, the closest you’ll come to reading a book In a foreign language while still reading a book in English. Reminded me a lot of cities of salt.
2.5 stars. The Amazon series is better. I didn’t like any of the characters, the mysticism seemed pointless, and didn’t like pkd’s style of writing. Still grateful he came up with the premise so that the show could exist!
Did you ever wonder, after seeing the episode 7 trailer, how a star destroyer could crash into a planet without disintegrating mid flight? Turns out the story behind that star destroyer wreckage better than any of the movies. This book is a young adult mass market novel based on a rewriting the story spinoff of Pop-scifi movies yet still manages to be unique and relevant. This book combined the classic young adult stories around elite academies, except that the academy was on the wrong side of the history of the new republic. Then it tackled patriotism, morality, loyalty, honor, and love for the next few hundred pages. It tied nicely into episodes 4-6, and made the new Star Wars universe feel a little more like an actual universe. ...
Competent, but not nearly as interesting as [b:All You Need Is Kill|6255949|All You Need Is Kill|Hiroshi Sakurazaka|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348712730s/6255949.jpg|6439033] or as biting as [b:The Forever War|21611|The Forever War (The Forever War, #1)|Joe Haldeman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386852511s/21611.jpg|423]. And as this review points out beautifully, there’s a lot of fridge logic going on.
It was probably competent, but I didn’t enjoy it. Lots of politics, it felt too much like an allegory of American politics in the 21st century. One thing I enjoyed about Lost Stars was that it made no attempt to interact with the films, and instead took a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern approach to the canon. I assume Bloodline had to operate within clear boundaries of what could and could not be written about, and suffered for it. For all of Disney’s billions, it seems like nobody has taken the time to establish a universe with politics and economies that make sense.
This book definitely has a target audience - somebody who hasn’t read anything about theoretical physics, doesn’t want to think about it too hard, but at least wants to know what everybody is talking about when they say quantum mechanics, big bang, or general relativity. I was not a part of this audience. I’ve read a few pop-science books before, The Elegant Universe about 7 years ago, and From Eternity to Here a few months ago. I enjoyed Eternity to Here much more; it went in to better detail about the mechanics of the questions that the author was trying to answer. A Brief History of Time covers nearly all the same subjects, but in a more general and useless fashion. ...
Throughout Neuromancer, I found it difficult not to be reminded of Snow Crash. It is clear that Neuromancer influenced Snow Crash- and I together they changed the course of Science Fiction and possibly influenced technological innovation of the past few decades. In both, the protagonist starts out a talented burnout at the bottom of his game, only to be chosen by the ruling powers of the time and sucked in to an epic struggle for the fate of the future dystopia. Both protagonists are more concerned about the digital world than the real one, and both authors offer a chaotic future where the 20th century nation-built world order has collapsed. ...