Reviews and Comments

A dense, meandering, weird story that I find really difficult to classify. On the surface it's about a strange disappearance and reappearance. Below that, it's about identity, unfairness of gender, possibly madness, probably a lot of other things that I couldn't classify. It's like genderswapped Philip K. Dick colliding with genderswapped Stephen King in the dark. Very much not for everyone, but I really liked it.

A tiny thing can sometimes spoil a reading experience.

Dead Space would have been a decent sci-fi thriller, but all I could think of was how the gravity on the tiny asteroid was constantly somehow depicted wrong, how things shouldn't work like that in what's basically microgravity, and I couldn't see past it. One of my pet peeves in movies, and turns out it also affects literature. Sheesh.

I liked this one in theory more than in the execution. Even though the plot was clever and the characters were interesting, most of them also suffered from a serious case of assholery and weren't really called out on that. Also, I didn't quite buy the technology in combination with the society that was depicted, even though the tech itself was interesting enough.

As I'd been hoping, the second book had a faster pace, so I ended up liking it a lot more than the first. Superhuman spies, smart and capable yet politically slightly naive, is a delicious premise, and the story has some nasty turns that had me giggling. Not as relentlessly bleak as Wild Cards, yet by no means an optimistic romp where everything turns out okay for everyone, this was just the right story at the right time for me.