Jon Taylor > Recent Status Updates

Oh and it’s also remarkably sexist. Portrayal of women is… embarrassing. Rather too much salivating over sexy teenagers too. Good job the story rattles along…

The story seems to be starting now… i can feel the page-turning need growing. Haven’t felt it for a while. Gotta love a space opera…

Falling into the old Sci-Fi cliche… interesting ideas, poorly written. The prose is clumpy, sentences which could easily be fixed left confusing which interrupts the flow of the writing. Characters are 2D archetypes. But there are so many ideas: the organic ships, the Edenist and Adamist philosophy, the anti-matter weapons! Still enjoyable…

Exciting passage involving space salvage. Great imagination and detail.

Enjoying the sentient spacecraft and the death and birth cycle of the Edenists. Fascinating and beautiful.

Plain prose, heavy science, fun.

Underwhelmed by the reveal. Hamed is the boss patcher with two penises? Who appeared to be killed by Daedra? Some character we knew nothing about is behind it? Reasonably exciting climax but I’m waiting for the whole thing to click…

The jackpot - a combination of events political and economic that bring about a type of apocalypse that only the rich and powerful survive. Seems remarkably prescient…

So, this el-Habib was the patcher Daedra killed with her thumb at the start of the book, except it wasn’t him, it was a peri. And el-Habib is what? A terrorist? And what does this have to do with Daedra’s sister being murdered or who has now kidnapped Flynne? I need to start taking notes…

And suddenly, I’m a bit lost… have to remember that last time I felt like this, everything became clearer a few chapters on…

Great imagery - in a bar resembling a downed airship…

Lowbeer feels like a caricature, but an enjoyable one. Not convinced that Flynne would be that keen to pretend to be an artist - or that Conner would take the time jump so casually. But at least the plot’s moving along nicely.

This is flying now. Conner in a peri’s body - made me smile for him but I fear it’s going to go wrong.

A fusion of realities. Interesting that, in this collision, there is uncertainty about ‘reality’ from Flynn, who is uncertain if she is in the future, as she has been told, or just in a game, or VR. How would she know, for sure?

Occurs to me that I’m enjoying the form - short, snappy chapters filled with short snappy paragraphs and sentences. Lots of dialogue so it’s pacy. Reminds me a bit of James Ellroy.

Like the detective angle. Who is Ossian?

This is a proper thriller now. Once you get the rhythms of his prose and begin to understand the tech, things get clearer. Fascinating idea - a conversation with someone from the past but they don’t know you’re from the future.

The imagination and depth of detail in it is boggling - the Lego piece that changed shape for example. And
the murder method. Now I understand that we have 2 narratives, one happening concurrently but 70 years in the future to the other, things are beginning to clear.

Something’s going on. It’s very much a ‘drop you in the middle of it’ narrative. And then I find one of the narratives is happening 70 years ahead of the other. Except in that narrative they can travel back in time… some stuff about alternate reality, a war, celebrity assassins?.. hope I can make sense of it all…

Grim, nightmare imagery of the ‘scorpion’ cracked in the dog’s mouth. Can’t grasp the metaphor yet…

Wish I knew what to make of Lebedyev. The monologue about technology seems prescient. But this doesn’t fit my view of him as a scoundrel. I could be reading him wrong…