Matthew > Recent Status Updates

Ya know, I'm starting to suspect that maybe giving monstrous cyborg chimera sentience and deadly weapons was perhaps not the ideal solution to counter insurgency operations.

Onyx Storm feels rather meandering compared to the previous two books. While I maintain all three books could stand to be cut in half, the first two had a much stronger momentum in both character and plot. Onyx Storm just lacks a clear sense of going somewhere, or that it has new ways to escalate.

I cannot escape my fate. I march towards damnation.

This book makes me wish I studied ecology

Palmer is certainly a more skilled at labour history than he is at colonial history. This isn't to say he's bad, per say, just that he struggles with organizing and conveying his arguments effectively. His linkage between colonialism and capitalism is valid, and well trodden ground, but it is presented ineloquently. As well, he needed to spend more time on the Indigenous people who dealt with the systems he explores

Morton might have provided an exhaustive history, but a deeply incurious one. The man spends far too little time on the why, in favor of covering every strike. The Rand formula, and the 1947 Ford Strike get one page, and the intellectual or social context for the labor movement is almost absent. There is a strong sense of internecine conflict and macro economic crippling labour, but even this is poorly explained

Martine really, really likes reminding the reader of how the imperials are cultural chauvinists. I swear Tacitus uses the word barbarian less often in "Germania". Still I can't deny that Martine does a really effective job of hammering home the imperialst culture of space Byzantium, the crippling and uplifting power of institutional memory, and the difference between speaking and communicating.