I made it to the book signing with Adrian and got my copy of Children of Ruin signed. Big thanks to the publisher for putting these events together, helps a book blogger gain some good memories, photos, and posts.
The event kicked off with a panel exploring just how alien aliens can be, which was fun and thought-provoking. What would a spider say to a human if the spider communicates by pulling strings? Why haven’t you all read Octavia Butler?After that, we had a short game, a Q&A session, and finally the signing itself.
I’m really glad I got the chance to attend. It was memorable!
I feel a bit silly reading a book that just turned into a TV show.
In book 4 of the series, the Murderbot flies between space stations and faces several attempts to be stopped. However, it has no clear goal or understanding what’s going on, and it’s also not clear why the rich corporations are trying to stop it. We’ll have to wait more books to reach that clarity. Alien artifacts are involved, so it is promising.
This and the previous sci-fi book I read made me think about something else.
The Murderbot is flying through wormholes. Sten in The Wolf Worlds is also flying through wormholes. Assume a wormhole existed, and I flew from point A to point B through a wormhole. No object in space is stationary. Galaxies move towards gravitational attractors, star clusters orbit around the center of the galaxy, and planets orbit around stars. Flying to the other side of the galaxy through a wormhole means that my spaceship will suddenly be accelerated to incredible speeds, compared to the local objects, speeds from which the deceleration may take years. The spaceships in both books do not address that.
There is no plausible space flight, unlike what we see in true 5* sci-fis like Legion or Project Hail Mary. And if we remove the space flight, this book turns out to be a short cyberpunk novel, similar to Gibson’s world, where a heavily modified human surfs the Internet like if it’s a water slide.
For that, I think I’ll allow myself to score this book 4/5, still a great little adventure. The sci from the sci-fi doesn’t add up, otherwise very nice.
I’m not sure how I feel about M. R. Carey’s work. I purchased five books by this author. Two are fantastic 5⭐ sci-fi, one was a 1 ⭐ DNF. Now comes The Trials of Koli, my fourth out of five.
Published in 2014, it’s a book about the survivors of a terrible war that changed the ecosystem. The trees are on a hunt for people, the animals are insanely dangerous, and old drones are still flying and killing people. The much larger populations of the past couldn’t resist all of that but the barely existing current populations seems to holding, although still in a decline. It helps that most of the old drones broke down or ran out of ammo.
The book is engaging, the trope is a form of the leaving-the-small-village-to-discover-the-world, well known from LOTR, The Wheel of Time, and so on. The type of demons out there are not unheard of either, we’ve seen them in The Mist, and The Finisher, and maybe even The Day of the Triffids.
What makes this book unique? Not sure, maybe nothing. But it is very interesting and sucks you in, you want to have more of it, and when you reach the end, you want to start reading the continuation immediately.
The two main characters, Koli and Spinner, are well-developed, though some of the supporting cast feels less successful. The story features two AI demigods—had they existed 200–300 years earlier, they might have either prevented the apocalypse or ensured its total devastation, leaving no survivors. In that sense, The Trials of Koli falls short when compared to The Book of Koli and the more recent Infinity Gate.
That’s enough for 4⭐/5. Looking forward to reading the final chapter.
A fantasy world with multiple types of sorcerers, various races, demons, necromancers, and a living sword similar to Kamigoroshi and Nightblood. On top of all that, we have pirates, airships, and fighter planes. Almost like One Piece with aircraft. How cool is that?
Ketty Jay is a plane-aircraft carrier, though it’s more of a dirigible by description. The crew consists of fugitives, people with guilty consciences, or both. Over the course of 530 pages, we get to learn about their sins and weaknesses. Even though they are murderers, thieves, and generally unpleasant people, they somehow manage to stick together. Chris Wooding gives us one or two explanations for why that is, but overall, the crew’s loyalty probably needs more exploration in the sequel.
The captain of the Ketty Jay is Darian Frey. He’s a selfish smuggler and pirate who has the habit of making terrible mistakes. He makes a big one and the book is about his attempts to fix it. We will learn that this was not his first blunder, not even the biggest one. The blunder is that he trusted the wrong person who set him up for a trap. Frey is in a need of retribution. However, Retribution Falls in the book is some Tortuga-like pirate city that makes no sense in a world with fast-moving aircraft, and the Dorian Frey’s retribution is just a coincidence.
The book is long and feels a bit sluggish at times. I could only manage a few chapters at a time before it somewhat hooked me. After that, it was okay—still close to the kind of stories I tend to DNF.
I think a 4*/5 rating is fair for a unique world (5/5), a relatively original story, and a solid group of misfits weighed down by a bit too much detail and some plot holes (2/5).
I plan to read the sequel, but not right away. Currently reading another book by M. Carey and it sets the bar too high.
Defiant is the final book 4 from the Skyward series. The series has other works, written in cooperation with Janci Patterson, that can continue indefinitely but Defiant ends the whole thing. It’s reasonably translated as “Towards The End” in Bulgarian.
Skyward is about Spensa Nightshade, a teenage girl who wants to become a fighter pilot on a world that suffers a constant attack by alien drones. She has some special skills that develop over time, and she becomes one of the best pilots humans have ever seen. Her growth makes the first 3 books very interesting, although she gets nerfed from time when she faces new and more skillful opponents. I rated the first 3 parts with clear 5/5s and they were very enjoyable.
Book 4 is an exception and doesn’t get the full score.
You get all the wonderful world building, which is signature by Brandon Sanderson, his great storytelling and then you glue it with super-heroism and random nerfs to get this beautiful hardwood hardcover book spoiled. Spensa, who started the series as an underdog with a dream, is now comparable to strength to the Infinity Gauntlet Thanos. She practices instant no-energy teleportation and instant telekinesis of objects with unrestricted mass, can read minds, project herself elsewhere, and is likely immortal through respawning like a demon from Julie Kagawa’s Shadow of the Fox series. There are objectively no reasons for the book to last longer than 5 pages – Spensa can teleport the heads of her enemies 50 centimeters to the right and it would just end without her leaving her room. As if that was not enough, she’s in constant contact with two immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient AIs.
What are all those overpowered characters fighting for in 460 pages? Their enemies deserve the highest honors for lasting that long by using trickery and deception. The TL;DR is that they fight with boxes.
I think the Skyward world is exhausted and do not expect a continuation but Brandon Sanderson is a genius and can come up with a problem difficult enough for his demigod characters to resolve.
I gave this book 5*/5 on Goodreads but it’s probably closer to 3.5*/5 due to the lack of balance in the force.
Veselin.blog 