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tiggymalvern
I'm a long way behind in talking about some of the books I've been reading. So here's a couple of the genre books I've read relatively recently.
The City We Became. - N. K. Jemisin.
Jemisin writes great books - there's a reason pretty much every novel she writes now is nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards. Her debut novel was weak (too predictable and formulaic, too Mary Sue), but its sequels and everything since have been far more innovative. The first novel of the Broken Earth series in particular was brilliantly done - perfect structure, pacing, and gradual weaving together of the story from disparate strands.
While I've enjoyed her novels, my personal taste is for sci-fi over fantasy, or for fantasy that's woven into reality. Which is where The City We Became really floats my boat, because it's fantasty set not on an alien planet, but in New York. A New York that is evolving, and as cities develop, they gradually become alive, with a personality and an avatar, a person representing them in a human body. But a living city, like most things alive, has predators, and a newly hatched city is weak and vulnerable to the things that would kill it. This book is dazzlingly fresh and weird, with a cast of characters that literally bring New York and its different boroughs to life (straight white people are definitely in the minority here). Looking forward to the next in the series! 9/10
The Saints of Salvation. - Peter F. Hamilton.
The final book of the Salvation trilogy, and I'm commenting on the series as a whole here. The trilogy jumps back and forth between two very disparate time periods. The first is c2200 when an alien spaceship arrives at Earth. The second is nearly ten millennia later, with the human race scattered across the galaxy, pursued everywhere they go by those same aliens.
There's a big cast of characters here, given the scope, and it takes a while to get to know some of them. The story unravels slowly, adding new strands (particularly at the start of the second novel) before finally pulling them all together through the third and filling in everything that happened between time A and time B. I like the societies he's created in both time periods, including the addition of nonbinary as a common and fully normalised third gender. It takes a bit of patience sometimes to get into the characters and the politics, and some plot threads inevitably interest more than others initially, but it's worth the wait through the ups and downs of both plot and pacing. 8/10
The City We Became. - N. K. Jemisin.
Jemisin writes great books - there's a reason pretty much every novel she writes now is nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards. Her debut novel was weak (too predictable and formulaic, too Mary Sue), but its sequels and everything since have been far more innovative. The first novel of the Broken Earth series in particular was brilliantly done - perfect structure, pacing, and gradual weaving together of the story from disparate strands.
While I've enjoyed her novels, my personal taste is for sci-fi over fantasy, or for fantasy that's woven into reality. Which is where The City We Became really floats my boat, because it's fantasty set not on an alien planet, but in New York. A New York that is evolving, and as cities develop, they gradually become alive, with a personality and an avatar, a person representing them in a human body. But a living city, like most things alive, has predators, and a newly hatched city is weak and vulnerable to the things that would kill it. This book is dazzlingly fresh and weird, with a cast of characters that literally bring New York and its different boroughs to life (straight white people are definitely in the minority here). Looking forward to the next in the series! 9/10
The Saints of Salvation. - Peter F. Hamilton.
The final book of the Salvation trilogy, and I'm commenting on the series as a whole here. The trilogy jumps back and forth between two very disparate time periods. The first is c2200 when an alien spaceship arrives at Earth. The second is nearly ten millennia later, with the human race scattered across the galaxy, pursued everywhere they go by those same aliens.
There's a big cast of characters here, given the scope, and it takes a while to get to know some of them. The story unravels slowly, adding new strands (particularly at the start of the second novel) before finally pulling them all together through the third and filling in everything that happened between time A and time B. I like the societies he's created in both time periods, including the addition of nonbinary as a common and fully normalised third gender. It takes a bit of patience sometimes to get into the characters and the politics, and some plot threads inevitably interest more than others initially, but it's worth the wait through the ups and downs of both plot and pacing. 8/10
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