The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies through the years of a long, dangerous career with the infamous Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy, at least before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her diverse team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade... but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir.

The highly evolved AI of the galaxy have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from ever regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all.

Welcome to The All-Consuming World, the debut novel of acclaimed writer Cassandra Khaw. With this explosive and introspective exploration of humans and machines, life and death, Khaw takes their rightful place next to such science fiction luminaries as Ann Leckie, Ursula Le Guin, and Kameron Hurley.

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Queer, LGBT, Fiction, Adult, Fantasy

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 7, 2021

About the author

Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer.
Their recent novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth was a British
Fantasy, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Bram Stoker
Award finalist. Their debut collection Breakable Things is now
out.

Reviews

[Lex Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every year I seem to read at least one book where after I finish I have to ask myself “what the hell did I just read?” well this was my WTH book for 2021. I was really excited to read this; morally grey, angry and dangerous, sapphic cyborgs out to find their missing friend while under their own death warrant… I mean that sounded pretty damn cool to me. This wasn’t on my most anticipate list of 21, but this book was high up there of books I was excited to read. Unfortunately, this was not what I was hoping for and I almost DNF’d it a few times. The reason I still gave this 3 stars is that I enjoyed the second half much more, but to be honest I do wonder if I’m rating this a little high since I had no idea what was going on a good chunk of the time.

This is my first time reading Khaw so I was not prepared for her writing style. I don’t know if she always writes like this, or if this was a special choice for this particular book. It was very purple prose like, yet it was mixed with odd word choices, and ways to use them, plus a lot of profanity. While I don’t use swear words in my reviews very often, I have no issue with reading them in books. The problem is if you are going around constantly saying ‘fuck this you fuckity fuck’ the word loses its meaning and most of its power so I have to wonder what really is the point? I’m going to quote the opening paragraph of the book so you can get a feel of the writing style:

“The fuck am I doing here, Rita?”
Her voice is the boreal wash of moonlight upon the bulwark of their ship-in-orbit: a reduction of the fantastic, tepid when it could have been of a devouring temperature. It is modulated, disinterested. But like fuck Maya is going to complain. Any contact with Rita is superior to the absence of such.

I found most of the first half to be pretty rough. I had trouble realizing what was going on and I was getting bored in certain parts. I’ve noticed some other reviewers have mentioned this and I think they are right on; I don’t think this story works well as a book. I think if this was an original movie for Amazon or Netflix, then it would have worked so much better. I think visuals were desperately missing in this story. I couldn’t tell when we were on a spaceship or even a planet. I also could not get a clear picture of what the characters looked like in my mind. These are women and nonbinary characters that are half machines, yet there were only certain modifications of body parts that I could really understand. Instead of saying something like “she had clear tubes connected to her back slowly dripping spinal fluid –which is something I could picture in my head- instead it was more like ‘tubes dripping bile hanging out of orifices’. Well what orifices and what were the tubes like? There were just too many times that I felt like I didn’t have the complete picture of what was going on.

The reason I gave this, and what I’m thinking is a generous three stars, was because of the second half. The book picked up and honestly the character of Maya saved it for me. Khaw did something that we don’t see a lot of authors do in that one character was in first and the rest were in third. I actually don’t mind this as I like the idea of having the main character in first and the secondary characters in third so we could still peak into other POV’s if needed. The problem here was that Khaw wrote the main character in third and a secondary character in first. I don’t get that choice and I think it was the main reason that it took me a long time to even just like Maya. Had her character been in first from the beginning, I think I might have connected with her a lot sooner so the first half of the book might have been better for me. The good news is she did eventually win me over. She’s completely messed up and a bit of a psycho killer, but her character actually had some depth. Her character thought she was in love with someone she never should have been, which put her in a toxic dependent relationship, while her heart was really in love with someone she didn’t believe she deserved. Her messed up love situation gave her character some substance we as readers could latch on to. Not only that but she was the only character that seemed to have real, meaningful, and hard conversations with other characters. While Maya was threatening to kill them half the time, her character actually had some growth which seemed mostly due to these convos. One of her convos was with the widowed wife of one of her comrades, and it ended up being one of the best scenes and dialogs in the whole book. Maya was absolutely the reason I finished this book and even enjoyed a few parts in the process.

Unfortunately, this is not a book that I can recommend. I’m just barely rating this 3 stars and I still might lower it as I’m struggling with this rating as much as I struggled with this book. I loved the mix of all the sapphic and nonbinary characters, and the actual premise was good, but damn if I didn’t know what was going on way too often. I believe we don’t get enough sapphic sci-fi, so I really wanted to love this but it’s out there. If you think you might be okay with this very different writing style and you love sci-fi, then maybe it will work better for you. I would suggest reading a sample when/if there is one on Amazon to get a better feel if this might be for you.

An ARC was given to me for a review.

[Emmett · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish I could give this a higher score, but that score would be very false. I actually can’t remember the last time a book fell below my expectations this hard.

I read These Deathless Bones by Cassandra Khaw a few months back and gave it 4 stars and have really been looking forward to their upcoming novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth. I was also looking forward to The All-Consuming World and was more than excited when I was granted an ARC of it.

Unfortunately, this novel was almost unreadable. I got to the 50% mark and then threw in the towel and just skipped ahead to the very last chapter. The book feels like an experiment in which the author only wanted to 1) use as many obscure words as possible & 2) use the word fuck more than it has ever been used in a novel before.

I have no qualms with the word ‘fuck’- it is a great word! Very versatile, can really change the meaning of something, don’t have a problem with it in my books. However, this was just excessive and annoying. Aside from the overuse of fuck, it really felt like Khaw was sitting next to a thesaurus, picking words at random… and then also throwing in modern colloquial expressions that you wouldn’t typically find in a novel. The result- a mess.

Examples of the writing:
1. Dulia of a magnitude that demands hecatomb.
2. Neither of us say anything for a hot minute.
3. “How the oil-gargling fuck are we supposed to figure out who the fucking fuck is going to try to fuck with Verdigris?”
4. “You fucking moron. What the fuckity fuck were you even fucking thinking?” Maya beams, euphoric under death’s neighborly shadow.
5. “Fuck. Fuck you and fuck Rita and fuck both of you for knowing exactly the right goddamned buttons to push. Thank fucking God.”

If those small samples don’t put you off- go forth. But I warn you that there is not much else in this novel other than the style, as the characters and narrative are completely eclipsed by it.

My advice for potential readers who are scared off by this review is to read ANYTHING ELSE by the author. What I read from Khaw previously was great… it just wasn’t this book.

*I received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fun stats time: there are
~700 'fuck's,
21 'goddamn's in all its glory-bearing variants,
12 straightforward 'c*nt's and
3 'vantablack's in this text.
Anyway, what's with all the 'fucking' used on every other page? No, multiple times on most pages.:
Q: the fuck-do-we-do-now silence .... fucking delighted ... Fuck. I knew it. I fucking knew it. I fucking told you ...
“Wait, I thought you fucking said you found her already—”...
“You said she fucking contacted you.”
“What the fuck is this shit?” ...
“I did not fucking agree... (c)
Q:
“Fuck,” says Ayane in tandem with Maya’s own private vociferation. (c) Yes, vociferation. And a very loquacious one at that.

Rating: we start at 5 stars:
- AIs focused on pop-/retro- culture weren't really believable. -1 star
- Ageships enjoying popculture... +1 star. Nice if not believable.
- Irritating cast set. Don'tget me wrong, I like the lgbtqia twist as much as the next person but Maya did not come across as a masculinely strong woman but as a complete moron. She's a ticking bombshell of a liability and I've no idea why they have been dragging her around. -1 star.
- The wonderful words bet (I think that's what it was: the author trying to win a bet on how many outlandish words could be stuffed into the text) +1 star
- The Dimmuborgir thingy? Probably a concept that was supposed to wield some religious connotations aimed at showing how religions are what? Something or other? +- 1 star
- Bio- / Zoo- splats -1 star
- the rest of the weird phrases that didn't really mean much (see above) -1 star
- The 700 fucks -1 star
- All the other cunts, gyrating worlds and other repeatables: -1 star.
- Gloriously bad writing +1 star. I'm gonna treasure this read for the worlds to come. I've got a whole shelf for books like this, I collect them.
Result: 2 stars.

For all the obnoxious verbosity and forced, very forced LGBTQ-ness, it's a fun read. Even though I still have no idea what ageships or the Butcher of Eight are (other than the latter likely had some oil troubles at some point).

It's like a fuckmachine an AI, armed with a dictionary, wrote this one:
Q:
... snarls that prismatic fourth, joining the chorus. (c)
Q:
Though a pleonasm, Pimento, incensed beyond easy classification, incorporates physiognomic markers of his dissatisfaction: cragged brow, rucked mouth, and so on and so forth, every pane of artificial flesh committed to comedic volumes of crenellation. (c)
Q:
Pimento cannot restrain his petulance this time, not with such scathing analysis of his zoological constituency, and so lacquers his response with disapproval. (c)
Q:
Any possible declension of identity is to be respected. (c)
Q:
The proposal: there is, somewhere in the pith of Dimmuborgir, a panopticon of superior intelligences operating in exquisite unison, glutted on knowledge, the kind a Surveyor would dismantle themself to savor. (c)
Q:
But there has never been anything coherent, nothing solid, nothing that can be stitched into a cogent narrative. Only rumors and unsubstantiated facts, an entire galaxy of suppositions, no less corporeal than any human-made numinosity. (c)
Q:
“Perhaps,” returns the Merchant Mind, still lackadaisical. They reticulate three of the screens together and dismiss the remainder, their approximate chin shelved on the heel of an open palm. (c)
Q:
Pimento remains stoically truculent. Something in one of his tagmata goes ping: a fugitive component? (c) Seriously?
Q:
Aqueous humor dribbles from the ruptured cornea ... (c)
Q:
she’s still too fresh from parturition to be of any gaugeable use, that first tussle having leached away whatever reservoirs were pre-installed in this new frame. (c) Yeah, the very gaugeable use!
Q:
The walls are abscessed with machinery of varying quality, a bootstrapped hodgepodge of recovered tech that is only tenuously operational. (c) Ah-ha, as opposed to what? Machinery of same quality?
Q:
shoddily held together by the spite of a voluntary suicide. (c) As opposed to involuntary suicide... probably.
Q:
That hallowed quarry, its mythos leviathanic. (c)
Q:
if Maya could pontificate on her current feelings. (c) Yeah, pontificate all right.
Q:
Her inner soliloquy becomes cacophonous, so loud that she does not register the triumphant denouement of Rita’s whole spiel. (c)
Q:
The station herself is conscious, of course, although prone toward bouts of protracted sleep. While insensate, a committee of partitions takes over, each of them zealots to a noxious degree, almost as if to commensurate with the core personality’s soporific agnosticism. (c)
Q:
Dulia of a magnitude that demands hecatomb. (c)
Q:
Something of value was stated. The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget. (c)
Q:
Something of value was stated. The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget. (c) So, she's peeping at them between her 2 fingers? Is that it?
Q:
sits with algebraic posture, (c) What kind of posture would that be?
Q:
In the liminality, a weft of laughter uncoils like smoke. (c)
Q:
a lipless mouth that begins and ends on opposite ears. (c) Same-side ears, I would've liked better.
Q:
“Is that what you see me as? Brain-eating amoeba?”
“I see its idiot elegance as something for us both to aspire to.” (c) What's so idiot about that elegance that a brain amoeba displays?
Q:
Doors nictitate apart as drone after drone is expunged. (c)
Q:
We becomes I, pathetic in its exiguous dimensions, a library of degrading memories, malformed. (c)
Q:
The tenebrosity doesn’t, however, linger. With every invocation of Verdigris’ name, it sallows, lightening to the juvenile colors of recent ecchymosis, that suppurating purple-yellow of ruined capillaries and beat-up flesh, an exhausted pigment which, fortunately, does not linger. (c) I've no idea what this is about.
Q:
Pareidolia is congenital. It is endemic to the sapient condition. (c)
Q:
Shut the fuck up, comes Ayane’s recipocratory shriek, the concussiveness of its reverb kept solely to their shared spatial weirdness. (c)

in particular, way too much dubious bio- and zoology:
Q:
... says Rita, an anglerfish lure in the teasing pinch of her tongue between white teeth, her small smile (c) Anyone seen anglerfish's 'small smile'?
Q:
the scientist’s blackbird frame. (c)
Q:
Give Maya a few minutes and there will be actual teeth, molars and incisors in a rain of fresh calcium. (c) No, really? Is that what the writer thinks is teeth and the rest of that debris?
Q:
a fox might surveil a sickly honey badger. (c) Interesting. Competitors, my ass. A honey badger might actually eat that fox and get well. LOL!
Q:
She sets herself down on one knee, slopes forward, one gracile arm outstretched like an olive branch. (c) Whatever she was doing, it must have been uncomfortable as hell.
Q:
it was the Penitents who fed me, chanting data like whalesongs. (c)
Q:
The cock of her smile, that let’s-set-the-world-on-fire stare. (c) Now, that's disturbing.
Q:
her skin becomes illuminated, becomes biblical in her very justified rage ... (c)

Some mixed metaphors that I love to hate:
Q:
The tension in the room is practically Damoclean. If the cacology of Ayane’s responses persist, Maya might just have to shoot her in the fucking head. (c) Damoclean tension? Cacology/persist and fucking in the same sentence?
Q:
that whole Scheherazadian procession of deaths upon deaths, (c)

It's a good thing I sort of like that sort of things. I imagine there will be other readers who are not going to be enchanted with the style.

There's seems to be way too much going on with oil, I'd say. Yes, I know, they are cyborgs but then again, why the old-fashioned oil and not, I dunno, some nanoliquid?:
Q:
Her fingers carve through the strands of artificial—like fuck au naturel hair could even dream of such lustrousness—keratin, pleating them together, a Sisyphean little tic. The braid doesn’t hold, oiling loose each time Ayane lets go. (c) Sisyphean tic? Oiling loose? Maybe get some shampoo to those clones fresh out of the vat? Might help with that.
Q:
... until their meaning becomes tessellated, syllables mixing like oil and blood in the rain (c) More oil and blood?
Q:
You’re the only one who made the Butcher of Eight weep oil.” (c)
Q:
gloves—the callused fingertips on the nadirs of her wrists; Rita’s coarse palms—such a shock Maya fishmouths idiotically, gaze vacillating between Rita’s bare fingers and her oilslick eyes. (c) I'm not even going to ask what that was with all the fishmouths and nadirs on wrists. But oilslick eyes?
Q:
They spill from the wall in a sudden lather of cables, oiling over the altar and across the chancel, gimbals maintaining an enviable smoothness in their tread. (c)
Q:
The Merchant Mind, I’ve seen him before and his half-shell ship, the insides sheened and stinking with oily effluvia. (c)
Q:
“How the oil-gargling fuck are we supposed to figure out who the fucking fuck is going to try fucking with Verdigris? (c)
Q:
Around them, the concert hall colors elegiacally: phthalocyanine blue shadows, viridian luster, an oil painting drowned in the bathyal deep. (c)
Q:
Maya contemplates this without rancor or judgement, jigsawing together, as she does, this new composite image of Rochelle: plumper in natural mid-life, better coiffed, with cardigans in a palette of pastels, but with black oil under her nails still and her magpie avarice toward every vehicle to stray into sight. (c)
Q:
Then: light oils across empty space, bends just so. (c)
Q:
Imagine an oil painter being handed the wrong tools, blindfolded, spun around, then told as the world gyres on strange axes that they need to record a sunset on a canvas they can’t see. (c)
Q:
For a flutter of heartbeats, Rita’s plastic ventricles pumping oil-compounds through her veins, I think about lying to her. (c)
Q:
Maya is chewing on her lower lip so hard, it is bleeding oil. (c)

Way too much seems to be going on with their voices or voice-boxed or dynamics or whatever it is that cyborgs use to talk:
Q:
As Rita continues to speak, her voice cracks, branchiates into emotion, actual fucking emotion. (c)
Q:
Her voice is the boreal wash of moonlight upon the bulwark of their ship-in-orbit: a reduction of the fantastic, tepid when it could have been of a devouring temperature. It is modulated, disinterested. (c) What was that with her voice?
Q:
The voice laughs, distinctly onomatopoeic and grossly syncopated: ha ha ha ha. (c) Yeah-yeah, very onomatopoeic and syncopated.

The world that keeps gyrating me into a dejalu:
Q:
the world gyres on strange axes (c)
Q:
The world gyres, nauseating. (c) Of course, it gyres. What else could it be busy doing?

Come on:
Q:
Rita doesn’t acknowledge either of them, purrs on instead, like she owns the airwaves, the very right to speak, her rich contralto whetting every word, sharpening every syllable. Some people wield knives; Rita could win wars with a whisper. (c) Isn't that a bit overloaded?

Q:
The strutwork beneath Ayane’s pleasing veneer is more tungsten than calcium, a nasty eccentricity she’d coded into her genetic formula after death number twelve roughly eight decades ago. It is a modification which severely taxes their rejuvenation tech, but nothing good comes free, not least a body you’d need ten men to budge. (c) Interesting, would this body be going through floors anywhere where they were not created with megaheavy fullmetal humans strutting about in mind?

Some nice pieces:
Q:
clonetech was a business of diminishing returns. Each resurrection mothered new health complications, fewer symmetries, like the body is a story that will persist until permitted to write its own end. (c)
Q:
She likes to believe she would have always chosen Rita, over and again, through every permutation of destiny. (c)
Q:
faith is another word for shooting yourself in the head. (c)
Q:
Until data corruption do them part. (c)
Q:
Incarceration is a state of mind, as Audra—Verdigris, my records remind me, she’s Verdigris now—once said. Entirely optional. (c)
Q:
why look beautiful when you can be seraphic instead?
Q:
Because humanity was led by their dysmorphisms and driven by their proclivity for breeding, gender was everything. It helped illuminate who they, according to a matrix of learned inclinations, might want to fuck. (c)
Q:
Somewhere, an AI is exploring nostalgia through linguistics. (c) Maybe this is how this book happened into existence. Hmmm...

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: KU
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.

*******************************************

I don’t know what to do with this book to be honest. All the trade reviews suggest it’s a visceral work of exhilarating genius. And most of the, you know, regular people reviews (such as the sort of reviews I myself write) are ambiguous at best.

I feel, if I’m honest, ambiguous at best.

Ultimately I think I admired this book more than I, um, liked it? The basic premise here is super engaging: the remains of all-female (later femme and nonbinary) crime squad get back together for one last job in a world of capitalism and cloning, and controlled by AIs. The first 50% is a getting the team together type situation, often with violence, and second half is them doing the job—something something Dimmuborgir something something—more by accident than design. Also an AI called Pimento, whose name people remark on twice, but is never actually explained? I don’t even know.

I think some of the things that felt … artificial? … to other readers didn’t bother me at all. I’m never going to find a cast of almost entirely LGBTQ+ characters forced or unnecessary: that’s the sort of thing that’ll sell me on a book, not put me off it. I have no issues with the c-word or an exuberance of fucks. The fact the AIs draw all their pop culture references from the 20th and 21st centuries, and talk slightly in meme? Whatever. Body horror, gore, and explosions? Yeah, I’m cool. Even the writing style—a combination of the excessively highfalutin with everyday—I mostly dug.

It's just nothing quite managed to come together for me. Or maybe (and this is highly possible) I was just too inept a reader to fully grasp everything this book was doing. But whatever the underlying cause, my failure to … uh … get it … meant that nothing landed the way it should have, be that the major beats of the plot (like why was everyone after the SPOILER and what it did it mean when they got the SPOILER) or the emotional climaxes, like Constance having any sort of on-page encounter with Elise, despite the two once having been desperately in love, Maya choosing to kiss Verdigris or accepting that Rita, who she’d been obsessed with and devoted to for the entirety of the book, was a manipulative sociopath. Don’t get me wrong, I cared enough about the characters in their ferocious brokenness that I was super glad when these things happened but I never quite understood … what was underpinning their happening when they did happen, if that makes sense?

I mean, given that clones are considered disposable and can be constantly brought to life, trauma memories of their previous death erased, Maya has been hopelessly entangled with (and, let’s be very clear, also complicit in) Rita’s bullshit for at least two centuries: and all it takes is someone to possess Rita’s (mostly dead?) body and lay down some home truths about Rita that Maya basically knows anyway to finally crack Maya’s loyalty? It didn’t feel like … enough, to me? And as for Rita herself, I think the book kind of did her dirty in that she’s sort of the villain in a way, more than the AIs at any rate, because she’s a fox in the henhouse, someone you think is broadly working to the same aims as you with the same values, when in fact she’s completely self-serving. OR IS SHE? Like she treats Maya terribly and abusively, for sure, but before the disastrous job that broke up the Dirty Dozen they seemed to be doing the kind of chaotic violent shit they all wanted to be doing anyway? It’s only the final job, the job they attempt to see through a second time over the course of the book, that went astray and got people killed-for-real.

Once Maya has abruptly understood the nature of the job and understood the nature of Rita she (spoilers ahoy) she expresses a sense of betrayal over the whole thing here:

“I spent two hundred years running around, shooting people for a piece of shit who wanted to [SPOILER] What the fuck? What the fuck?”

But, like, we also learn that Rita was essentially in her last body (her clones degrading for some unspecified reason) … so under the circumstances why was it bad or wrong for her to want to SPOILER. Like this is a world in which death has become broadly meaningless—or at least something you choose—in the sense clones can be re-made endlessly and bodies preserved with enhancements: why was Rita supposed to just accept an arbitrary death when nobody else has to? Plus, given the book ends with all four of the main characters becoming SPOILER, why was it okay for them to do that, when we’re supposed to apparently agree with Maya that it was selfish of Rita to pursue the same? And, yes, okay Rita’s pursuit of SPOILER wasn’t something she was open about and got people killed in horrible ways but the reason she claims to be reuniting what’s left of the group is, in fact, out there. Is, in fact, true. And does, in fact, come to pass.

Also, none of them are happy in their post Dirty Dozen lives. Constance, in particular, is choosing to age and die because she can’t bear a life without one of the people they lost. And and and AND while Rita certainly manipulates them all to come along, with Maya’s assistance, she is not the one who ultimately blackmails them to go through with SPOILER; that’s someone else, who locks away access to their clone patterns. That seems a lot worse than Rita’s crap if you ask me. Not that I’m saying either approach is okay.

And, look, I’m not defending Rita or her actions here, nor am I denying her relationship with Maya is profoundly not-okay: she’s clearly a terrible human being, but they *all* are, is the thing. They’re all hopelessly shaped by trauma, despair, and their own worst impulses: it’s what makes them so fucking relatable. But, while I didn’t need a definitive answer about the who and why of Rita, we never get any kind of reckoning with her: she kinda does the closest thing to dying off page and that’s mostly it. Possibly that’s deliberate—people like Rita we never really get to work out, we can only squint over their pieces in aftermath—but it felt deeply emotionally unsatisfying to me, either as retribution or explanation.

What’s especially frustrating is that when the book does choose to open its heart, it’s really breath-taking. There’s a scene between Maya and the wife of a member of the Dirty Dozen who chose to live and die that’s absolutely gorgeous. Sad, tender, full of grief and beauty, it held me rapt in ways the rest of the book did only fleetingly. And, you know, maybe that’s on me, I prefer people holding hands in rooms to blowing each other up with grenades. But couldn’t we have both?

The All-Consuming World is so clearly a book with things to say—things I normally really want to listen to—but it feels like it often so chooses to say them in the most obstruse way possible. Again, I’m more than willing to blame myself as a reader for this, but it seemed like I spent the whole book wanting more of some things, and less of others, and consequently the pacing seems utterly out-of-whack: too fast or too slow, only completely right in this one scene with the grieving widow.

This brain-fucking combination of too-much too-little extends even to the writing itself which is clearly unique and brilliant in its capacity to bring wildly oppositional concepts into fleeting poetic harmony. But also I just, sometimes, wanted something to be expressed simply and with sincerity?

I could, speaking purely personally do with less of this:

How Ayane’s name alone is sufficient to extirpate the haunting from her eyes.

(In all seriousness, what is EXTIRPATE doing for that sentence? Nothing. It is doing nothing. Apart from making you go get a dictionary because nobody, and I mean nobody, has the word extirpate on speed dial in their brain. It is an ugly, stumbling word that disrupts both the rhythm and meaning of the sentence).

And this:

Around them, the concert hall colors elegiacally: phthalocyanine blue shadows, viridian luster, an oil painting drowned in the bathyal deep.

(Three of elegiacally, phthalocyanine, viridian and bathyal in a single sentence feel like they’re doing something; four just turns the whole thing into lexical mush. Also what does an oil painting drowned at a particular oceanic depth have to do with the elegiac? I think it’s just gonna be wet).

And more of this:

This is love too: sacrament, unconditional surrender of the selfish ego […] Love’s work, reminds that memory of Reyha. And sometimes, it is hard work. The work of a funeral. The work of fielding condolences, writing thank-you notes, keeping a son alive, keeping yourself alive, keeping sane when you wake up in bed alone for the first time in more than twenty years. It is the work of saying *yes to the ghost of your dead first love, yes, I accept you’re not coming back, that you choose the grave over me, that it is okay, that I’m here, that we’ll do this together one last time, that I love you, always, always.*

Like that is stunning. It is brutal and brilliant, and the language chosen—its rhythms, its peaks and valleys, the way it begins in short concrete sentences detailing pragmatic tasks, and then accelerates towards this explosion of abstract, impossible, enduring emotion—is working perfectly to convey and enhance the meaning of what is being expressed.

And, listen, I’m aware this is very very much a personal taste thing; I appreciate the artistry and the intent that has gone into prose like this. I just think that, for me, about 20% less would have been the sweet spot.

Take this kiss for e.g.

Verdigris kisses her then. She tastes of cool water, salt-sweetened and sunlight-warmed. Of being young, of a youth that Maya knows she never fucking experienced yet there it is, a florescent memory of staggering through early life’s myriad tragedies: first loves and their fumbling sweetness, disintegrating faiths, the dregs of childhood sublimated into the construction of the adult pneuma. All those things, those hominid rights, evoked without advance notice and with searing clarity.

All the small kindnesses she was owed.

All the sweet joys she could have.

She thinks of Reyha in the house she and Rochelle built, haunted and hopeful, hallowed and held by love.

Okay, so I love this? At least, I love the beginning and I love the end, and I love what it’s saying, and I love what it builds to but … like …does hominid … hominid? really bring anything to this sequence? I mean, I understand we are animal beings but—call me old fashioned—I don’t personally want a chimpanzee evoked in the middle of a kiss? To be honest, I’m not mad keen on pneuma either: since it’s a word that, while it may have a specific philosophical meaning to the ancient Greeks, is mostly recognisable to the modern reader in the context of, y’know, pneumatics … hydraulics … which is, again, not a useful set of images to bring to a moment of such significant and fragile emotion in a text so shaped by violence and dehumanisation.

To take it even further, what “the dregs of childhood sublimated into the construction of the adult pneuma” is attempting to encapsulate for us is the way our childhood experiences feed into the creation of our adult persona. I get that, but metaphorically speaking the phrase encompasses a really jolting transition from water-type images (dregs) to air-type images (pneuma), and places that already fairly challenging idea directly alongside a second equally challenging image, which is the notion of something ephemeral (pneuma) being constructed (and obviously one can construct things ephemerally but, once again, it’s word that evokes physicality in the context of a word that does not). Then, on top of all of this, we have “sublimate” to deal with. Are we talking sublimate in the psychological sense rather than the chemical sense, but the thing about the chemical sense? It’s explicitly the process by which a substance is transformed from a solid to a gas without passing through a liquid state – so, y’know, non-applicable to the watery dregs of childhood. And I realise I’m probably taking this both too metaphorically and too literally at the same time, and probably the whole point is to have these contradictory images and ideas jostling against each other in pursuit of some ultimate meaning, but I actually feel on this occasion, as on others, it more sort of … impedes meaning? Distracts from meaning?

Oh I don’t know.

There’s an afterword in the back of the book where the author explains that The All-Consuming World started as 20k of a “strange idea … mostly in pieces” and they sent it to their editor, who worked with them to turn it into a book. Putting aside the fact that I’m pretty sure that if I sent 20k of a “strange idea … mostly in pieces” to my editor, they’d be unlikely to say “this is definitely a book I want to buy” and far more likely to say “what the fuck Alexis Hall, you’re fired” I do find myself retrospectively wondering if maybe this would have worked better a shorter, more focused piece.

But that also feels like useless speculation. Especially because The All-Consuming World is the book that … well exists. And while it left me personally conflicted (and a little confused), there was a lot to appreciate here and—for a different reader—perhaps to love.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, so it turns out I'm a total fanboy -- still -- for Cassandra Khaw.

We're moving way beyond Lovecraftian food shows and diving head-first into an amped-up version of Altered Carbon, classic Heist fiction, enough ammunition to choke a city, and world-eating super AIs to keep things toasty. Delicious. Fast-paced. Salty as all hell.

In a universe where it's all dog-eat-cyborg, only the angriest survive -- and believe me, this novel is ALL about the rage, the pain, and the f***ed up Lesbian Cyborg relationships. It's really fun! But yeah, it's also about the pain. :) And getting that one last score before there's simply nothing left.

The atmosphere is the best part of this novel. It goes way beyond normal cyberpunk and gets gritty, pushing all that hardcore SF, and kicks all kinds of ass. There are some really funny parts, too. No spoilers, but the weird is absolutely delicious.

I need more of this in my life. Simply.

[Fiona Knight · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have loved so many of Cassandra Khaw's other books and short stories, but this didn't feel like her - instead of the punky, rebelliously ornate scifi that I think it was meant to be, it just felt like a mess.

Plenty of other reviewers have covered the points I want to say, so I'll keep this brief, because I hate writing negative reviews for books - no matter what else, writing a book is deeply personal, hard work, and reading is so subjective that just because I didn't like it doesn't make it bad (in most cases - bad books absolutely do exist). But The All-Consuming World feels like Cassandra Khaw attempting Tamsyn Muir and not finding her own voice within it, losing the writing that makes her usually so excellent in the process.

If you're new to the author, don't start here - she's written so many excellent works, and I'd hate for them to be missed if this doesn't catch your imagination.

[gauri · Rating 2 out of 5]

on another episode of me being disappointed by books that sound good: nothing captured my attention, no strong worldbuilding and i had a difficult time getting through the chapters. also, personal opinion but there was so much profanity every four sentences that it kinda put me off, even though i generally don't mind swearing in books.

[charlotte, · Rating 2 out of 5]

On my blog.

Actual rating 2.5

Rep: sapphic mcs, nonbinary mc, genderfluid mc

CWs: suicide, eye gore, violence, surgical procedures, amputation

Galley provided by publisher

The All-Consuming World, for me, was a book that was a whole lot of vibes, and not a lot of actual… anything else almost. I’m not even sure I can truly say I liked this book, in part because I’m not sure if I know what was going on half the time. There’s a heist? An estranged team of criminals? They want to tear down some system or other?

I think this goes to show two things: just how unmemorable I found the book, and just how little specific there was for me to actually remember. The story is never really grounded in anything—for a lot of it, it’s not even clear if they’re on some planet, or a spaceship, or simply floating around in space, and that’s not even getting into when it’s set (if it is, indeed, set in a when displaced from us).

On top of that, the characters and relationships seem a collection of tropes, rather than anything approaching coherency. Usually, I don’t struggle quite as much as this to remember a thing about them, but trust me when I say, I do not recall a single iota of information. I wrote down two notes about these things, which represent the sum total of what I can add to this: one, that a certain relationship appears to come out of nowhere (it’s not telegraphed either in one of the members’ POVs, or outside of it), and that a second relationship (which just so happens to involve one of the members of the one I just mentioned) grows very tiring very quickly.

In fact, as a whole, the book grows quite tiring in general. I think this is in part because I really did not get along with the writing. It’s very purple prosey, which would be fine!, if that purple prosey-ness was grounded in anything. But the book is light on worldbuilding, and light on anything tangible it feels, so the prose ends up grating. And hence, I start skimming.

None of this is to say I don’t think other people will like it—it’s a fast paced heist story and, for all that I struggled, I was still compelled to keep reading. In fact, for the right person, this is a book you can immerse yourself in, and come up hours later to find you’ve binged it in a single sitting.

But me? I wasn’t the right person.

[Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm deeply torn about this one. On one hand, I adore the things that Khaw does with language. This little novella took me ages to read because I kept going back to reread over and over their frenetic, frankly bonkers phrasing in absolute marvel. I love Maya especially as a character, and if her endlessly repetitive, "Fuck this, fuck you, and fuck that too," attitude grated a bit in the beginning, I found her character arc fulfilling, and this entire book stuffed with flashy, awesome ideas and characters and concepts. But on the other hand this is missing something fundamental, as though it's a lot of flashy, awesome ideas and characters and concepts splashed on a page without anything to tie them all together into something satisfying. I would read another 100 pages of this in a heartbeat if it made it all make sense and I'd spend another book in this world, definitely, but color me frustrated at it on the whole.

[Lata · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.
With every flesh-shredding bullet, Cassandra Khaw's main character Maya swaggers and shoots her way into and out of every situation she gets in in this wild, ultra-violent and spectacularly profane and fast-moving and sometimes impenetrable plot.
On the surface, this is a getting the band back together type stories, if your band is a group of women who happen to be clones, criminals, and have a serious case of "I hate you" for each other. It turns out there's a legit reason for the animosity as there's collective guilt and anger about the deaths of some of their group after their last job.
This time, there's a chance to recover one of their lost members, and we see how utterly dysfunctional and terrible the women's dynamic is. We also discover that there are vast artificial intelligences, whose intents are generally unknown and terrifying and inimical to, well, pretty much everything, and specifically to the group and their current job.

I love Cassandra Khaw's work. Her writing is beautiful and visceral, and often immersed in bodily fluids. However, I wish this book had been a little shorter, as I found the plot dragged in some parts. I was also a little mystified by some scenes (except for a wonderfully touching conversation Maya had with Rochelle's wife),
I love this author's writing--I see so many colours in her work--but, I also realize that Khaw's writing is not for everyone. Despite my slight difficulties with some of the action, I liked this.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Erewhon Books for this ARC in exchange for a review.

[The SciFi Book Guy · Rating 1 out of 5]

So yeah, I tapped out and couldn’t finish this book. Sorry dudes, I very rarely do this, and I did try to push through, but the grind wore me down. It’s such a shame because the story has everything I would want in a book. Hell, it has everything I dream of. I was so amped to read this book that I texted my friends to let them know that I’d be ignoring them for a bit. Except I forgot to let my mom know and she called me when I was just getting settled in to read. “Not now mom, I got my Yeti Rambler full of margaritas and have a book I need to read… no, I don’t care that it’s your birthday.” So you can imagine my disappointment (and hers!) when I couldn’t even bring myself to finish. And no, don’t worry about my mom, she’s in ok health and should have a few more birthdays to celebrate, she’ll be fine.

Anyways, the story is this gang of queer clone cyborg mercenaries are getting the band back together to perform one last space heist and try to correct the wrongs of their past. Holy shit! That sounds fucking awesome! I accept your apology for thinking poorly of me for blowing off my mom on her birthday to read this.

The problem is that the book is pretentious as fuck! I’m no Bill Shakespeare but I thought I had a decent grasp of the English language until I read this. I had to stop several times per page to check the definition of a word. That’s a surefire way to kill any sort of flow and most certainly my margarita buzz. Now I’m sure there’s a bunch of learned folks with big brains who will love this, but not this hombre. The characters, universe, and story all seemed amazing, but I’m just too dumb to understand this one.

Anyways, that’s about all I got. Adios amigos!

Oh wait, check out my rad site for more content like this: The SciFi Book Guy

[Tim Hicks · Rating 1 out of 5]

You'll love it or hate it. I hated it. That happens. All of the following is more about me than about the author, although many of the reviews here seem to be with me.

I'm no fucking saint, but if I wanted a big dose of "Fuck this fuckety-fucking fuckery" I'd have watched Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker. OK, their world is a dystopia, and their situation is too, but we get that.

If I wanted a thesaurus gone amok, I'd re-read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (Hellfire!) which is, amazingly, even less cheerful than this. Such telic, improvident and gratuitous exudation makes me dyspeptic and immedicable.

I gather there's going to be hacking and hewing and gore, too, but I can get that with bells on from Asher and Abercrombie.

Khaw has chosen the "just drop them into it" approach to worldbuilding, which is a valid option, but gosh, this is barely a sketch. They have FTL and cloning and AI Minds, but 109 pages in we still don't know whether we're on a space station, underground on Enceladus, or in a parking lot on the outskirts of Albuquerque.

Rita is a manipulator, an expert liar, apparently amoral. Maya is a deadly bundle of rage. They are entangled with the Merchant Mind, which is also amoral. I didn't get far enough to see what Elise and Constance were. Maya hates Rita but would do anything for her, and thus hates her even more for that. Several of them are also queer, and that's fine, but in the midst of all the chaos here it hardly matters.

Finally, there some marvellously poetic writing here, full of ruffles and flourishes, and Khaw is obviously very good at it. When this gets made into an action movie, all that will be lost. But for me, that would be good, because I'm just here for the story, not to admire the craftsmanship of individual phrases and sentences.

I'm DNF after 110 pages. I'm sure these fucked-up fuckers are going to have a hard time pulling off their incomprehensible heist, and no doubt all sorts of bonding and re-evaluation of worldviews will occur, but I'm moving this one into condign desuetude because I DON'T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM. As Malcolm Tucker would have said, "Fuckety-bye."

[Bertie (LuminosityLibrary)]

I'm really sad that I didn't enjoy this one, it was one of my most anticipated reads of the year. I feel like if you enjoy the writing of this book, you'll love it. Unfortunately, the writing really grated on me and overshadowed everything else I could have loved about the book. It felt like I was reading a thesaurus sprinkled with swear words. It felt like a struggle to sit down and read, to figure out who the characters were, or what they were doing. I didn't enjoy myself at all. It's such a shame because it seems to have everything I could have loved.

(Thanks to Erewhon Books and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review).

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[Brenda Mcallister · Rating 1 out of 5]

Generally do not like to give a bad review, especially when the book is freely given to me. However I read several chapters and have no idea if the author can write or not. It was like reading a dictionary without a story. Chapter after chapter of random vocabulary words that told me nothing except the author loves the word fuck! My eyes glazed over after a couple more pages and it became one of the very few DNF books on my shelves. Very convoluted descriptions of everything, will not try this author again.

[Amanda at Bookish Brews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning, expansive, punk, angry, imaginative, dense, ornate, turbulent, brilliant

The All-Consuming World was a book that I was really anticipating coming out. When Erewhon sent me a copy in the mail I was absolutely overjoyed! Erewhon books is one of my favorite publishers, and Cassandra Khaw has other incredible works out. Honestly, opening this book at first was a bit of a challenge. The world-building is dense but flowery all at once and unique to any similar books that I’ve read before, so I wasn’t able to stay grounded in any kind of assumptions of the world. The group of misfit ex-criminals is full of rage and bitterness so they swear a lot, which is jarringly juxtaposed by the writing style that was both precise in some parts and ornate in others. This book breaks your assumptions and shatters your beliefs in what a book needs to be.

Though the text took a while to start understanding, once I made it halfway through I started to see how clever Khaw’s writing actually is. They confused me to challenge me. The dense world helped me explore my imagination and push the boundaries of my thoughts. The prose is constantly changing and matches each character’s perspective perfectly. The ornate writing trains you to detach from what you know about humanity, technology, life, and consciousness in order to reach the climax that really turns everything on its head once again. All of this makes for a turbulent reading experience, but one that completely paid off for me in the end.

Quick Summary: The All-Consuming World follows a group of angry misfit ex-cons coming back together to relive their last mission that ended in tragedy. Broken and traumatized from the last mission that cost them their friends, the group begrudgingly agrees to go back to the planet that ruined it all in the hope that one of their dead friends isn’t dead after all.

Continue reading...

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[Selena · Rating 1 out of 5]

I consider myself to be capable of some pretty pretentious writing, and this shit made even my eyes roll.

[Laura (crofteereader)]

DNF @ 20%

Having read some of Khaw's horror (mostly short stories, but I would argue that's the best way to really get a taste for the writing style: when no words can be wasted), I knew to expect highly detailed and evocative body horror. What I didn't expect was just how... Wordy this book was. It reminded me of trying to read Turn of the Screw before The Haunting of Bly Manor came out on Netflix: I thought to myself "oh, it's pretty short; shouldn't take long." Instead (and Khaw does the exact same thing but with way more profanity) each paragraph is 4x longer than it needs to be. Almost every sentence (even dialogue, which is absolutely criminal to me) was peppered with jargon and lists and just word vomit to the point where all forward momentum or necessary information was totally obfuscated by the sheer number of different ways to say "fuck".

I was looking for a scifi horror, but instead I got totally incomprehensible insults. And yay normalized queer characters but everyone's a sociopath? The book starts with a violent murder spree and suicide/kidnapping (it's complicated) and the characters proceed to emotionally blackmail an ex-friend after literally murdering her to convince her to... I'm honestly not sure what the end goal was.

CW: gore, self-harm, suicide, gaslighting, blackmail, torture, body horror.

[Zana]

DNF @ 6%

The author's prose is so purple and so unnecessarily pretentious to the point where this is both unbearable and unreadable.

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5
I got an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Now that it’s officially available to everyone, it’s time for me to bite the bullet and sadly slide this off into my DNF pit, with only casual hope of excavating it later.

I really wanted to like this book. What’s not to love about angry, gun-slinging, sapphic cyborgs scraping by in a post-apocalyptic universe? It has me written all over it, right down to the ample trauma baggage everyone carries and deft exploration of class, bodily autonomy, relationship violence, and beauty. But, I couldn’t do it. The analogies were effusive to the point of being overdone and overwhelming even if they were evocative. It seemed like everything was analogous to something carnal or canine or cybernetic or all three, and it clogged rather than clarified the writing. The MC’s use of the word “fuck” was also sloppy in its prevalence, sounding closer to an angsty eighteen year old trying to seem edgy than a hardened cyborg guard. The plot was a whirlwind that often left me asking what the hell I was reading, and not often enough in a positive, awed way.
Still, this DNF rounds up to 2 stars for me because even if it is not written well in my mind, I think this book will be a great ride for people who like pages upon pages of bloody, angsty mechs with superfluous analogies and not a ton to hold on to.

[xyZeereads]

I honestly wanted to like this, and forced myself to read through the superfluous and pretentious writing, but unfortunately didn't enjoy any of it after a couple of chapters. What's happening? Something to do with Dimmuborgir, but it's all lost in the overly crass drivel.

I'm really hoping Shaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth is nothing like this, because it's one of my most anticipated reads of 2021 (and mainly because of that cover!)

DNF.

Many thanks to the publisher for the ARC, but didn't enjoy this one at all.

[Nova Syzygy · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you held me at gunpoint and asked me to name a single thing that happened in this book, I wouldn’t be able to. This writing style seems to be designed to be skipped over. I understood the words individually, but the paragraphs registered as complete blanks in my brain. I don’t even know what rating to give.

[Danika at The Lesbrary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The All-Consuming World is a little bit heist novel, a little bit noir narration, a hint of Lovecraftian, and a whole lot of gritty sci fi.

Maya is a rabid dog of a mercenary clone who is ready to fist fight with god. She is entirely, illogically, wholeheartedly devoted to Rita, a mad scientist type. Rita is cold, withholds affection, and is always pulling the strings in an elaborate scheme. She’s manipulative, even cruel, and always five steps ahead of anyone else.

This is a fairly short book at 275 pages, but it packs a ton in. The narration style is distinct. Maya’s POV chapters -- which are most of them -- use the word fuck about once a paragraph. Throughout the book, Khaw uses really distinct metaphors and similes -- sort of like a noir detective story, but with a bloodthirsty futuristic perspective. For example, “the sound unspooled between neurons like a tendon snagged on the tooth of a Great White.”

Also, either keep a dictionary on hand or just bask in Khaw's superior vocabulary. I kept rediscovering words I haven’t encountered in years, and then bumping into a good chunk I’ve never seen before.

It also has a great queer and non-binary cast who are all very distinctive. There’s an ethereal, worshipped pop star that literally glows and has multiple mouths trailing down her neck, and a disembodied woman in code corrupting the conversation from within -- just to name a few.

This isn't my usual genre, but I had a great time reading it. If you can handle gore and nonstop swearing, and you're up for learning some new vocabulary with your queer sci fi heist/clone mercenaries/??? plot, definitely give this a try.

I discussed this in more depth on All the Books, or you can read my review at the Lesbrary, which goes up Jan 15th, 2022.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bunch of women outlaws reunite to...do what? Right, get one of their own back, save humanity, or just for the prospect of lots of violence? Wait, the two of them who are initiating the operation use plenty of violence just to get the others to join. Killing each other is almost routine; they have plenty of clone bodies for reanimating.

Maya, the main (but not viewpoint) character, is optimized for violence; she can adjust her body chemicals to feel more or less violent, but mostly she stays on a mad dog setting. She is programmed, by Rita, who's a nasty sociopath, to be devoted and obedient to Rita. She is not at all stupid, but has very little in the way of choices. It was painful to watch her, as everything she does is according to her programming. Because she had no choices, I also found her kind of boring, as much as someone whose main pleasure is in shooting or blowing things up can be boring. She does get more nuanced, but not until almost the end of the book.

The universe is one in which AI have become dominant, and they apparently have modeled their lust and struggles for power on humans. The crew has to deal with a couple of formidable AIs, and there's a subplot, which merges into the main plot, of a smaller emergent AI named Pimiento who's trying to get ahead.

I was pulled into this book by rave reviews on the cover from authors I like. My experience wasn't theirs. While I liked the snarkiness and fuck-you spirit of the crew, there was too much blood and gore for me. I didn't have empathy or sympathy for any of the characters, except possibly Pimiento. I dragged myself through the first 3/4 of the book, which was all about getting the crew back together. Then, once they were really on the mission, the story came together better, and I was enjoying it. And then it ended.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

The All-Consuming World is about a group of ragtag femme/queer ex-cons who are trying to fight to save one of their own.

I think.

It was really hard to read and understand this book. The prose was mega purple, and all the medical/scientific jargon was not well placed. And if I saw one more “fuck” I was gonna lose it. The inclusiveness of the book felt forced and put in last minute.

It’s possible I had a very early draft of this book and some of these things will be more cohesive in the final copy, but for now I’m going with a 2 star rating. I was tempted to DNF, but I really wanted to see how it ended. The 2 stars comes mainly because I really liked the plot. It was just not well executed at all.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the chance to read this advanced review copy, but it was not for me.

[Roxie Voorhees · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

Just no. Read the other reviews and decide, but this was not my bag of chips.

[David Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Cassandra Khaw’s novel The All-Consuming World was a straightforward science fiction novel, that would be exciting enough. The plot—the ragtag, damaged remnants of a group or women mercenaries, once feared throughout the universe, reunite to save one of their members who may still be alive after their last, failed mission decades before—has all the hallmarks of a classic space opera, and is as satisfying as can be.

As it turns out, however, Khaw has so much more up her immensely talented sleeve, because this is one of the most challenging, exhilarating, and downright breathtaking works of science fiction I’ve read in a long time. She uses language like no one else. I’ve been trying to think of apt comparisons, and the closest I’ve come is Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb Trilogy, and maybe Felix C. Gotschalk, a science fiction writer from the 1970s, but Khaw is very much doing her own thing. She wields words like some kind of mad wizard—dense, spiralling across paragraphs, always surprising. Khaw writes violence and action set pieces with an anarchic, joyful abandon, and bruising emotional scenes with a devastating tenderness.

If Khaw’s language elevates The All-Consuming World, her ideas send it into the stratosphere. Immortality through cloning. Extreme, extravagant body modification, both hardware and software. Ruthless, highly evolved AI. Sentient spaceships, even a sentient planet. Human consciousness running roughshod through computer networks. Khaw takes ideas that other authors may build entire novels around, and sprays them across every page, like shot from a shotgun.

Khaw asks profound questions about what, exactly, is a human being, and when is one no longer truly human. She explores complex webs of gender and sexual orientation with a deft hand and an unflinching eye. And at the center of it all, woven into the fabric of memory, trauma, heroics and betrayal, The All-Consuming World is a love story. Actually, because love is complicated and painful, make that several love stories.


The All-Consuming World will be released on August 17, 2021. Pre-order it now, and prepare yourself for one hell of a ride.

[belle ☆ﾐ (thisbellereadstoo) · Rating 3 out of 5]

dnf @46%

i think this would be great for a sci-fi lover who understands the world but i just couldn't get into it. i wanted to read as much as i can but i couldn't get anything. there was too much vulgarities that broke my concentration a little bit. i didn't want to spend more time on it since i was planning to read another book from the author later the month. didn't want this to influence my experience with that one.

[Mae Crowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The characters in this are so interesting. They're interesting people with interesting backstories and relationships, and I loved getting to know them. Unfortunately, the book never went anywhere significant with any of it. We got some slight character arcs, and hints of an almost heist-like plot, but the story never felt whole. Even the introspection that I adored in this felt unresolved. Still, I enjoyed the time spent with these character, and the writing style was just up my alley. I just don't think this is a story that's going to stay with me for very long.

[Brianna Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is definitely not for everyone. Put simply, it's weird. It's a violent, rage-filled, red-hot, heart-pumping fever dream of an experience.

But for its strangeness and its flaws, I did enjoy it.

The world was interesting to me; a far-future with intelligent space ships, artificial minds ruling the galaxy, and clones with their minds backed up to a cloud, allowing them to die and be reborn again and again.

I also enjoyed the POV of Maya, a traumatized clone made to be subservient and violent. I couldn't help but root for her to break free of the toxic, abusive situation she was in.

But there were things about this book that didn't work for me. The plot structure was odd, and there were a lot of things going on that I frankly just never understood. Part of this I blame on the writing style, which often chose over-the-top literary flourishes and obscure words over clarity. There was a lot in the writing that felt superfluous and even repetitive. It could have used a fair amount of tightening and reworking.

The f-bombs, too, are... something! I'm a fan of that particular word and the punch it can bring, not gonna lie. But I've never read so many fucking f-bombs in one single fucking book. When you keep fucking using the same fucking word over and over again, it loses its power, and starts to feel like a fucking crutch, you know?

So in short, not a perfect book, not for everyone, but I still enjoyed the experience. If you like your sci-fi weird, brutal, unapologetic, with violent sapphics leading the show, this one may be for you.

[Ines · Rating 2 out of 5]

The blurb of this book sounded right up my alley, and the story would have been, too. If I hadn't been so distracted by the writing.

This book has ... words. So many words. It seems the author lost a bet and now needed to incorporate every single word in the Oxford English Dictionary in this one book. Especially the verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I found this very distracting and, frankly, unnecessary. It took a lot away from the story, which could have been told in half the pages and, if you took away all the overuse of language, was unfortunately not that exciting after all.

Which makes me sad, because I did like the premise and the worldbuilding was super interesting. I wish we would have learned more about that. I also liked getting to know the characters one after the other. Unfortunately, the writing took away from both.

The characters did not seem too different from each other, because they all spoke with the same voice and used the same flowery language. On top of that, they didn't really do much in the story, didn't make many decisions that would allow them to show who they were, so they were not very distinguishable. Or maybe they did and I just didn't recognize it beneath all the words. I can get behind one or two characters speaking like that, but all of them? The no-bullshit, down-to-earth killing machine (who's the POV for most of the chapters) that is literally described as "just a weapon" speaks AND thinks like that? I don't believe it.
There were also a lot of spelling mistakes and parts of sentences that will probably be corrected in editing. The pronouns for two of the characters were all over the place, first they were established and then they were constantly misgendered in dialogue and inner monologue. I hope this will be corrected, too.

The worldbuilding I liked a lot, it was something new and interesting and it excited me. But again, do AIs speak and think in flowery language? All right, maybe those AIs are so far evolved from machines that they developed like that, it's her world, her choice. But then add all the references to current pop culture on top of that and I couldn't believe any of it, it didn't make sense.

The story that was there was entertaning and I wish I had gotten more of the characters interacting with each other and the world around them, going through friendship, love, hate, betrayal, and just basic survival in this strange, dangerous world.
But all in all, the writing took away too much for me to enjoy the experience of reading this book.

Thank you to Erewhon books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.