Zan > Recent Status Updates

The opening chapter: I love the descriptions, the picture painted of everything that once lived here. But even more, I love the author’s rage. Thank you, Flores, for your unambiguous condemnation of our eradication of plains life.

Pronghorns: I barely knew a thing about them, but they’re *cool.*

Coyote chapter: I went through rage, tears, wonder, horror, triumphant laughter. I want to go paint coyotes now.

This is delicious and I can’t put it down. But a small thing I keep thinking: why is everyone, including Carrie, acting like she just up and left on a whim? Why doesn’t someone, anyone, point out that she was basically forced to choose between immediate conscription into a foreign army, and unwanted surgery?

Please, please, please let the love interest be who I think it is. Please?

I am seriously getting sick of Harry being a jerk to everyone for no reason.

WILL YOU PLEASE STOP DESCRIBING EVERY FEMALE CHARACTER LIKE YOIRE LEERING AT HER?!

This world-building is delicious. Hooray for worlds that actually feel like *worlds,* not just stand-ins for countries.

There have been a few slow passages, but when this book gets going, it’s really good fun. Possibly this is because I enjoy watching libertarian assumptions of human rationality get smashed by evidence.

This author makes the reader work. There's a constant stream of alien names for creatures and peoples and phenomena, often left unexplained. And so far the point of view has shifted to a new character in a new place and time with every single chapter, leaving the reader to make sense of a whole new situation, only to leave it behind, unresolved, soon afterward. I'm enjoying it, but it's exhausting.

The geological history so far is interesting, but I'm ready to be getting on with talking about actual Cambrian life now.

Hephaestus! Awesome.

I forgot how funny the sisters are, in the midst of their constant doom. A bit reminiscent of Buffy.

So many tasty things in this book.

Such a weird and wonderful array of stuff in here. And a Doctor Who story, event!

The protagonist is a woman described as heavyset. It's hard to put into words how unexpected that was. Or how satisfying. Another major character is part of a multi-partner relationship, so far depicted quite realistically. Pretty great.

The stories are compelling, but bleak enough that I can only read them one at a time.

I admit I'm kind of a sucker for the handsome enigmatic bad-boy genius scientist.

Oh dear. Only a few pages in, and suddenly there's clumsy exposition. Not an auspicious beginning.

Really enjoying it overall. But argh, did he just get two key characters to sit down and share the backstories he's been teasing... And then *completely gloss over the contents of said stories*? I mean, one of them we basically know, but the other is a total mystery, and I now sadly suspect we'll never hear it.

King really was startlingly clear-eyed. So much sharp insight here, speaking with the experience of having lived through the civil rights marches, seen what they accomplished, and also seen what they did not accomplish. There is weariness and frustration in his voice, but never resignation.

I love this book, but at least in the beginning, it's so thick with big concepts that, by the time I sit down to read it at the end of a day, it's all I can do to wrap my head around one page of it.