Reviews and Comments

I originally picked this up because the tag-line looked like this book would be about Roko's basilisk. While this is technically not wrong, the concept really just plays a world building role (like FTL travel and ansible communication) rather being the focal point of the story. It is not even explained, just implied and the reader is expected to know about it already.

The main theme of the story are cosmic horrors and the relationship between science and spiritualism, done in a very interesting way. It should be noted that although this is about cosmic horrors, it is not at all scary. Overall, it was not at all what I was expecting but nonetheless very nice!

This is quite different from what I usually read but I liked it a lot. It's just very funny in the beginning, later on it gets a little more dramatic. The only criticism that I have is that the book is ~700 pages of buildup for ~100 pages of payoff, but that seems to be by design.

I'm reading the German translation of this (the original is Dutch).

I'm still not quite sure what to make of this. The most interesting aspect of the book, I think, is that you get to see a lot of quite technical topics in logic through the eyes of a journalist who is not really a mathematician. Also, the language is quite nice. Overall, I liked it.

I was somewhat disappointed with the second book in this series because it didn't really deliver on what I wanted out of this. This is not at all a problem here; you are getting exactly what you expect: Lots of violence in interesting settings, involving interesting characters. If you liked the first one, you will also enjoy this one (you could actually skip the second one without much harm, I think).

It was enjoyable but nothing beyond that. I'd neither encourage anyone to nor dissuade anyone from reading it.

This book is unfortunately just a mixture of blockhain cringe and what I like to call Wikipedia fiction (i.e. fiction in the spirit of someone who just learned of Wikipedia and now things the internet will somehow solve all societal problems; think Neal Stephenson). Doesn't align at all with my political views so not at all enjoyable. (I believe the only way such books can be enjoyed is if they can give you hope for the future, which this one doesn't for me)

Actually not reading at all but listening as an audio book instead

I have enjoyed some of the author's past books and this is more of the same: A fairly complex political/economic system being explained in some detail, highlighting the clever ideas and tricks come up with by some clever people to circumvent it/get an edge. The only problem this time is that it focused on baseball, which I know only the very basics of (certainly not all of the lingo they seem to have). Still very fun, but I'd recommend going to the more purely economic titles, like "Flash Boys" or "The big short" first.

Started listening to the audio book.

I picked up this book because I wanted to read something slightly outside my comfort zone. This certainly was. Overall, it was an enjoyable story, centered around a fun cast of characters (as Fanatsy usually is, I suppose). The world building was also a little outside of the cliche, most of the action scenes being focused around magical guns rather than swords and shields. In the end, it was fun but I am not planning on picking up the sequel.

I really enjoyed the book's "prose" or rather lack thereof. The writing is very straightforward, reading at times more like a play, including many grand monologues, rather than a novel.

However, the book's subject matter is not fun at all: It basically describes various ways in which political operatives acquire more power, always justified by "the survival of civilization". All in all, it reads as a praise of imperialistic tactics, which is pretty gross.

I read this expecting it to be very similar to its prequel: a cyberpunk noire novel with lots of violence. The latter part still features prominently but the plot revolves around an alien artifact excavation this time. It's still fun and all but not really what I was looking for.

This book shines with its very interesting world. The coolest aspect to me was the mathematics-based space travelling (with sometimes somewhat wonky pseudo-mathematics, admittedly). This book only scratched the surface of what there is to know about the world of Neverness. It seems there are 3 more sequels to this book but they've been out of print for a long time so it may be tricky to get my hands on them. I'll still try, though.