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towering_tbr's review against another edition
4.0
This was a very unusual ARC for me to receive. Instead of being a traditionally published book that I could buy as a physical or ebook source, this book is available via the website and app called Serial Box. I received an ebook copy to read. The book is published as a season and chapters are called "episodes."
The story is a political science fiction focusing on a sniper called Asala who is called upon to look for a missing refugee ship. She is accompanied by the leader's adult nonbinary offspring named Niko. The solar system is in decline with many planets fighting over limited resources. As they look for this missing ship, they realize there is much more going on than they initially realized. While this is a great story on the surface, there are also important messages about refugee crises, climate change, sexual and gender identity, and racial discrimination layered in the book as well.
It is odd for a book to be authored by four different people but for the most part it worked. Each chapter was written by one author, each of them taking turns. I could somewhat tell the differences within their writing styles but it wasn't distracting enough to take me out of the story. I gave the book 4 stars and have found out that season 2 is in the works now. I will likely read the sequel.
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a copy.
The story is a political science fiction focusing on a sniper called Asala who is called upon to look for a missing refugee ship. She is accompanied by the leader's adult nonbinary offspring named Niko. The solar system is in decline with many planets fighting over limited resources. As they look for this missing ship, they realize there is much more going on than they initially realized. While this is a great story on the surface, there are also important messages about refugee crises, climate change, sexual and gender identity, and racial discrimination layered in the book as well.
It is odd for a book to be authored by four different people but for the most part it worked. Each chapter was written by one author, each of them taking turns. I could somewhat tell the differences within their writing styles but it wasn't distracting enough to take me out of the story. I gave the book 4 stars and have found out that season 2 is in the works now. I will likely read the sequel.
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a copy.
arkham's review
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
atlantic_puffin's review
Perhaps more of a me thing, but I was thinking too much about the few mentions of the MC’s deafness and hearing implant (and being dubious about how they were handled) to actually start the third chapter . . .
lezreadalot's review against another edition
3.0
Maybe someday a poet would write a tragedy about this day. In it, she would be a villain.
3.5 stars. I have mixed feelings about this book, but most of those feelings are good? As it often is whenever I come back to scifi after a long break from it, this reminded me powerfully of all of the things I love about the genre; the space opera, the worldbuilding and all the potential in it, and this in particular had so many meaningful real world parallels that I adored. My mind was whirring all while reading this, and I was never not fully engaged.
I actually went in pretty much blind, which I found really enjoyable, though not everyone would. The broad stroke are: the story takes place in a system on the brink of death. Years of mining have taken a toll on the sun, and it's about 100 years away from dying. The planets on the outer rings are suffering, literally freezing to death, while the planets on the inners rings who are responsible for the mining continue to profit from it. The situation has created a refugee crisis, with thousands upon thousands fleeing the dying worlds, and most of the inner worlds being ambivalent or downright hostile to them. The main character, Asala, is a refugee, having been sent off world by her family more than 30 years ago, and she's eked out a life as a soldier/sniper in the inner rings.
The plot starts with the micro and grows in scale to encompass the whole system in fascinating and surprising ways. It's been a while since I've read deeply involved scifi like this, but the worldbuilding and characters didn't take very long for me to grasp at all. It's just really great to take these huge, universe-altering plots and put them in the hands of normal people, and see how things spin out from there. It worked really well in the beginning, where I just devoured all the political workings, all the gradual reveals. Coming down to the end, as the scope of everything just got bigger and bigger, it started to feel like things are were happening out of control, and all the big reveals and revelations were coming too fast; so fast they stopped really having an impact, no matter how shocking they were. The authors wanted to do a lot, and near the end, the narrative started suffering for it imo.
Speaking of the authors! This was really masterfully written and crafted by all of them; I've only ever read Solomon before this, but they're all obviously juggernauts of scifi and they know what they're doing. This was serialised; 10 episodes in all, shared up amongst the four writers. I thought that each writer would be handling a different set of characters, but that wasn't the case. Asala was the main POV (along with a few important secondary POVs) and they all wrote her. This didn't work super well for me? The first episode was written by Huang, and I absolutely loved it, and loved Asala as written by her. And since that was my first experience with Asala, every other writer's interpretation of her felt... slightly off? Not by much, not anything that's terribly noticeable, but I did notice, and it made the story feel a bit disjointed. Unavoidable, with a work that's been serialised like this, but I thought I'd mention it, as it did curb my enjoyment some.
But there is undoubtedly a LOT to enjoy here. I was super impressed with all the culture here; all the stories and nuances about the different worlds. The was an emphasis of written and oral history as told by plays and poetry that reminded me very favourably of A Memory Called Empire. I really loved our main characters, especially Niko; they were so freaking brave, and I understood every decision they made, even if I didn't always agree. This shines a spotlight on humanity at its worst, but also its finest. And the ways authors do that through scifi is always very rewarding to me.
I definitely enjoyed this a lot, even if that enjoyment waned coming down to the very end. I don't know if I'll read the next season, but it's definitely intriguing enough for me to want to give it a try.
Content warnings:
Spoiler
death, murder, injury, gore, genocide☆ Review copy provided via NetGalley.
clairevlinney's review
adventurous
challenging
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
auntie_terror's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
kgruie9's review against another edition
adventurous
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
theaurochs's review against another edition
2.0
A mediocre and run-of-the-mill sci-fi adventure story. Particularly listening to the audio version (by many accounts the preferred way to experience this), it is a strongly serialised story that feels distinctly like a mid-budget tv show more than a cohesive novel. You can feel the different authors pushing and pulling in different directions, which gives a result that is less than the sum of its already underwhelming parts. Also much like a mid-budget tv show, it wraps up without any real satisfying conclusions, left to the whims of the network as to whether or not we will ever see an end to the story.
The story follows an older grizzled mercenary as she is teamed up with the precocious young child of the president of one of the planets in a star system with many inhabitable planets. The star at the centre of the system has been mined for fuel and as such is growing colder, rendering the outer planets uninhabitable and provided the catalyst for the societal drama. The Merc & the Child are tasked with locating a missing refugee ship, which sends them on an interplanetary adventure, coming into contact with people on different sides of various conflicts, and primarily the approximately five important people in the solar system. I realise that by some necessity, the characters we meet in any plot should be important to the narrative and the events, but here it feels so small-scale, in the two main characters have to come into contact with the leaders of every faction. It’s almost Forrest Gump in its levels of convenience and being in the right place at the right time. It lends a feeling of the two main characters being the player characters in a video game, and the whole universe is just there waiting for them to interact with; nothing important could possibly happen without their presence.
This might be less of a problem if either of these characters were interesting, but that unfortunately is not the case. Grizzled Old Merc is a pretty stock Grizzled Old Merc character, and Young Precocious Child is the same for that trope. The different writers for different chapters mean that their characterisations vary too much to really be consistent or satisfying, and their abilities veer wildly as the plot demands. By halfway through, Grizzled Old Merc is a superhuman pilot, flying an aged ship through state-of-the-art attack drones, while Young Precocious Child hacks through the state-of-the-art security system; rendering them as superheroes who can solve any challenge with no setbacks. So now, we’ve removed any element of stakes from the plot. We spend the rest of the series bouncing from location to location to chase down macguffins and Important Characters, before the inevitable final act massive battle. Side note on characters- I appreciate having a gender-neutral main character in Young Precocious Child, but I don't think it was handled very well in this case- particularly there were some specific instances where Young Precocious Child assumes other people's genders in really noticeable ways, which seems like a dick move (to this gender-neutral-pronoun-using-person, anyway).
Right ok, so we don’t have any interesting characters, the plot is fairly rudimentary and without interesting stakes. What else could be said to be going for this story? Certainly not the worldbuilding. The tech is frustratingly handwavey and matches whatever level is required for the plot at that time. There is a deep lack of internal consistency which prevents it from ever really presenting a believable world. But worse than unbelievable, there is nothing novel or interesting presented here either. It feels like such a stock world, with default space empire #2 only vaguely changed from the standard settings. The outer planets slowly becoming less habitable does allow for some exploration of what it means to be a refugee- the troubles of maintaining a cultural identity in the face of displacement, and the struggle to create such identities in the face of marginalisation and repression. This is probably the largest redeeming feature, but even that is handled somewhat haphazardly, and with varying deftness depending on which exact author is writing the chapter.
A forgettable sci-fi romp that does a disservice to the several authors involved in its creation; the joint effort shows off more of their weak point without allowing their strengths to shine through.
The story follows an older grizzled mercenary as she is teamed up with the precocious young child of the president of one of the planets in a star system with many inhabitable planets. The star at the centre of the system has been mined for fuel and as such is growing colder, rendering the outer planets uninhabitable and provided the catalyst for the societal drama. The Merc & the Child are tasked with locating a missing refugee ship, which sends them on an interplanetary adventure, coming into contact with people on different sides of various conflicts, and primarily the approximately five important people in the solar system. I realise that by some necessity, the characters we meet in any plot should be important to the narrative and the events, but here it feels so small-scale, in the two main characters have to come into contact with the leaders of every faction. It’s almost Forrest Gump in its levels of convenience and being in the right place at the right time. It lends a feeling of the two main characters being the player characters in a video game, and the whole universe is just there waiting for them to interact with; nothing important could possibly happen without their presence.
This might be less of a problem if either of these characters were interesting, but that unfortunately is not the case. Grizzled Old Merc is a pretty stock Grizzled Old Merc character, and Young Precocious Child is the same for that trope. The different writers for different chapters mean that their characterisations vary too much to really be consistent or satisfying, and their abilities veer wildly as the plot demands. By halfway through, Grizzled Old Merc is a superhuman pilot, flying an aged ship through state-of-the-art attack drones, while Young Precocious Child hacks through the state-of-the-art security system; rendering them as superheroes who can solve any challenge with no setbacks. So now, we’ve removed any element of stakes from the plot. We spend the rest of the series bouncing from location to location to chase down macguffins and Important Characters, before the inevitable final act massive battle. Side note on characters- I appreciate having a gender-neutral main character in Young Precocious Child, but I don't think it was handled very well in this case- particularly there were some specific instances where Young Precocious Child assumes other people's genders in really noticeable ways, which seems like a dick move (to this gender-neutral-pronoun-using-person, anyway).
Right ok, so we don’t have any interesting characters, the plot is fairly rudimentary and without interesting stakes. What else could be said to be going for this story? Certainly not the worldbuilding. The tech is frustratingly handwavey and matches whatever level is required for the plot at that time. There is a deep lack of internal consistency which prevents it from ever really presenting a believable world. But worse than unbelievable, there is nothing novel or interesting presented here either. It feels like such a stock world, with default space empire #2 only vaguely changed from the standard settings. The outer planets slowly becoming less habitable does allow for some exploration of what it means to be a refugee- the troubles of maintaining a cultural identity in the face of displacement, and the struggle to create such identities in the face of marginalisation and repression. This is probably the largest redeeming feature, but even that is handled somewhat haphazardly, and with varying deftness depending on which exact author is writing the chapter.
A forgettable sci-fi romp that does a disservice to the several authors involved in its creation; the joint effort shows off more of their weak point without allowing their strengths to shine through.
tzurky's review against another edition
4.0
This story has both an interesting premise and a novel structure. It’s a serial novel where each chapter is written by a different author. And it’s a classic sci-fi space opera setting used to tell a very modern story in a thought-provoking manner. The theme is refugees: what they go through, what it means to be one, how they are perceived and treated. And true to most sci-fi explorations of current topics of political commentary it has a multi-faceted and much more nuanced approach than either news pundits or many novels dealing with the subject. Transposing the subject matter into deep space in an alien solar system populated by cultures unrecognizable to us has a way of both cutting to the heart of matter and permitting a more in-depth analysis without any of the pitfalls of speaking about recognizable cultures, countries or even people.
It’s also eminently a story about family bonds and how they evolve over time. Both the main characters have an uneasy relationship with their families and are struggling to reconcile their daily duties with their understanding of what it means to be a part of their respective families.
It’s also surprisingly versatile in style. It starts of as a classic buddy cop story with the eager newcomer and the world-weary mentor and then it adds in the space opera and a cyberpunk flavor with a strong sprinkling of dystopia.
It helps that I loved the characters. It may be my own damn fault for continuing to read them but I’m a bit over-saturated with ‘young’ stories. This isn’t just a matter of age though, but mostly of how characters behave and what their goals in life are. While Niko is young and eager to prove themselves, they’re definitely not stupid and they aren’t a love-sick puppy mooning over someone or on a typical ‘chosen one’ path. On the contrary, that trope is lambasted in all its ridiculousness here. There’s none of that idealistic streak - this is a ruthlessly pragmatic story both in how the events unfold and in how they affect the characters and their relationships. It’s not bleak and misanthropic but there’s a distinct lack of faith in the general goodness of humanity. Only the realistic recognition that many people do come through for others when it matters - as best they know how and to the best of their abilities (which means their efforts may often be counter-productive); also: there’s a bunch of egotistical assholes around as well that will go out of their way to ruin things for others. And they’re not monsters either. They’re the good ones in their own mind. On this note: kudos for one of the absolut best villains - the general is absolutely blood-curdling in a very believable way.
Basically, this is a 5 star story as far as it goes. The transitions between authors are surprisingly smooth. The characterization is consistent and subtle throughout. There’s really nothing to fault. My issue is that I’m a ‘completionist’ and firstly it’s uncertain whether the story will ever be completed. Secondly, I’ve heard the second book is measurable worse (and it’s not written by the same authors as the first but by less famous ones). So my enjoyment is somewhat dimmed by the fact that we don’t get a real conclusion, we don’t get full character arcs and damn it all to hell but I was really hoping for a facile Katharsis having the villain basically burn in hell. She’s awesomely hateable!
It’s also eminently a story about family bonds and how they evolve over time. Both the main characters have an uneasy relationship with their families and are struggling to reconcile their daily duties with their understanding of what it means to be a part of their respective families.
It’s also surprisingly versatile in style. It starts of as a classic buddy cop story with the eager newcomer and the world-weary mentor and then it adds in the space opera and a cyberpunk flavor with a strong sprinkling of dystopia.
It helps that I loved the characters. It may be my own damn fault for continuing to read them but I’m a bit over-saturated with ‘young’ stories. This isn’t just a matter of age though, but mostly of how characters behave and what their goals in life are. While Niko is young and eager to prove themselves, they’re definitely not stupid and they aren’t a love-sick puppy mooning over someone or on a typical ‘chosen one’ path. On the contrary, that trope is lambasted in all its ridiculousness here. There’s none of that idealistic streak - this is a ruthlessly pragmatic story both in how the events unfold and in how they affect the characters and their relationships. It’s not bleak and misanthropic but there’s a distinct lack of faith in the general goodness of humanity. Only the realistic recognition that many people do come through for others when it matters - as best they know how and to the best of their abilities (which means their efforts may often be counter-productive); also: there’s a bunch of egotistical assholes around as well that will go out of their way to ruin things for others. And they’re not monsters either. They’re the good ones in their own mind. On this note: kudos for one of the absolut best villains - the general is absolutely blood-curdling in a very believable way.
Basically, this is a 5 star story as far as it goes. The transitions between authors are surprisingly smooth. The characterization is consistent and subtle throughout. There’s really nothing to fault. My issue is that I’m a ‘completionist’ and firstly it’s uncertain whether the story will ever be completed. Secondly, I’ve heard the second book is measurable worse (and it’s not written by the same authors as the first but by less famous ones). So my enjoyment is somewhat dimmed by the fact that we don’t get a real conclusion, we don’t get full character arcs and damn it all to hell but I was really hoping for a facile Katharsis having the villain basically burn in hell. She’s awesomely hateable!