Reviews and Comments

If I say "Groundhog Day meets Agatha Christie", I'm sure I'm not the first ... but that's a remarkably accurate description. It's like 8 whodunnits stuffed into a single book, and the accomplishment is pretty incredible. This is a story I'll remember for quite a while.

What a troublesome book. On one hand, it did have huge scope and imagination, but on the other hand it kept me at arm's length from its characters and left me feeling pretty cold. This is clockwork epic fantasy -- perfectly thought-out but somewhat soulless, or maybe a Michael Bay vision of same -- huge spectacle, but as a reader I didn't really care.

It took me three hundred pages to find something to actually interesting. I had the same problem with Black Company, which I read is a major inspiration here. Even so, I think I might be interested in finding out if the sequels have any more emotion.

Still an excellent hard sci-fi story, but this one had annoyances the previous installments didn't. The viewpoint character for this one spouts way too much macho bullshit for my taste. Also, even though sexism and racism always were right at the front of the Lady Astronaut stories, the gender war here seems relentless and really tiresome. Also one of my least favourite tropes "I'm not going to tell my loved one(s) things to protect them" rears its ugly head; one of the reasons I enjoyed The Calculating Stars was its utter refusal to deploy poor communication as a plot point.

Despite occasionally grinding my teeth at the points mentioned above, this is still a very good, very hard science fiction story about living on the Moon. The plot is effective yet non-convoluted, and when things get nasty, you really feel the blows. Definitely recommended.