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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.

@tfb@functional.cafe @abs@ihatebeinga.live Didn't end up liking it. Might be just a me thing, though. I can't get into military SciFi where you need tons of IRL military knowledge to really parse what's going on.

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.