Reviews and Comments

This was much better than its predecessor "Consider Phlebas", which really suffered from pacing issues. Here, interesting ideas are explored at a leisurely pace without fully losing the element of suspense. It also is about post-singularity civilization, which I always adore.

Different from what I usually read but I enjoyed myself a lot.

Not the easiest read for me, but still fun of interesting ideas and beautiful prose.

I did not finish this one. The whole premise seems to hinge on the idea that you can just arbitrarily reorder the steps of a deterministic computation. This clearly is not possible in general and the book does not even try to come up with an excuse why it should be possible in their setting. Am I just supposed to suspend my belief for that? It then goes on to expound lots of philosophy based on this premise, but it all rings rather hollow for me given that the lynch pin is so ridiculous.

The first third of the book is somewhat boring, I often felt a little disoriented. However, the rest of the book really delivers. Many questions from the first book are answered, thankfully many are also still left open. As opposed to the supernatural themes of the first book, this one is more about political intrigue/conspiracies. Still very well executed.

It is short and interesting throughout. The main character is insufferable, though.

Just too slow and really not that interesting. Gave up after ~400 pages.

This was sold to me with pretty strong promises it did not quite keep. However, it's still good and does hold up.

This book is written fully from the point of view of non-humans, humans only playing a minor role. That's a lot of fun!

Read the whole thing in a day. Lots of fun!

I expected some of the usual teen dystopia YA but got so much more!

There's a great cast of characters which grows on you. Later books keep calling back to the events of previous books and the included short stories.

It starts out reading like a palace intrigue story, with many scary and daunting things looming in the future of the protagonist, once he starts making friend and allies, things turn around for him. The last ~100 pages are just pleasant pay off for all the characters introduced and bonds built, which was very pleasant to read. All of it still feels earned as well.

I read this in a day because it just gripped me. Slightly disturbing but in a very strange way.

The narration style takes a little bit to get used to and things are very confusing at first. However, it becomes great quite quickly. There are a lot of short timeskips in the book which mean you only every read some of the most exciting bits of this story.