The Consuming Fire

A wise man once said: The failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'. The Consuming Fire spends way too much time in the failure mode of clever.

It's not a bad story, as such, it's just that the style of writing constantly rubs me the wrong way. Everything is dialogue, like a radio play. Everyone is trying to out-clever everyone else. Everything is a joke. While there's substance here, it's all subservient to style. It knows its tropes and winks knowingly while employing them. But the rub is: knowing the tropes and pointing them out is just being cynical, if you're not elevating your material beyond them. Redshirts did that. TCF does not.

TCF wants to be as clever Redshirts, but falls flat. This is easy reading, this is space opera in the guise of junk food, this is being a smartarse without being smart, this is characters saying 'fuck' a lot, this is sex and death and horror and mystery, all of it feeling breezy and light and inconsequential. It's also competently written, the plot has some nice twists, I'll be checking out the next book in the series as well, and probably will write a smart-arse review about it. Because if your book thinks it's too cool for school, the readers will end up thinking they are that as well.

All my concerns from the first novel are addressed in Scalzi's second 'Interdependency' novel.

The politicking is a lot stronger, more detailed, and very clever. There's some nice action pieces, and the world is developed further.

Emperox Grayland II starts to uncover the history of her nation, and because she's not been raised by the familial dynasty, she has fresh eyes that helps her recognise patterns others might not otherwise see. She grows as a leader and a character, and whilst there are some leaps in logic, it makes sense how she'd get there, but because we have seen her journey I sometimes find that the character we see here doesn't connect strongly with the character we saw in the first novel. Still, the author leans into her nervous and emotional-focused inner monologue often enough to show us that she is the same person.

Scalzi adds a character from waaaay outta left field, and he's a great character that's fun, and in the audiobook I listened to Will Wheaton does a wonderfully terrible French accent. He's a great personality, and there's some shenanigans that make it clear that there's a "bigger picture" happening, we just aren't privy to it yet.

And, also, Keva. She's awesome. I'd read it just for Keva.