Amelia Wein > Recent Status Updates

This is a weird story even for Neal Stephenson

The first part was excellent with an amazing female lead, but ended on a cliffhanger. Picked up in the next chapter 10 years later with a different storyline and different, scumbag lead. No resolution yet to the cliffhanger and the heroine has been reduced to a side-character/love intereset. Screw you too, David Mitchell.

This is not a book for a biologist. I am cringing at every sentence, and it just keeps getting worse as it goes on. I'll keep trying, but it looks like this is gonna be another expensive mistake.

I finished the first story in the collection, Installment Plan, but the only interesting thing about it was the view into 1950s American mentality. The. A travelling salesman with a team of robots goes to an alien planet to trade with the people there, and he won't take no for an answer. It is absurd and unethical by today's standards, but apparently in 1950 you could write a non-ironic story like that.

Kay's writing matures a lot over time, and so far The Summer Tree is much less developed than his later work. I bought the three book Fionavar Tapestry series, and none of the characters are actively annoying me, so I haven't given up yet. It's not pulling me in at all though.

This book is very intense. It's so interesting to read about life in New York in 1976 from a first person, contemporary point of view. It threw me off when the main character called people born in 1950 "babies". That's a few years older than my father, and I'm not that young anymore myself...

This book is very intense. It's so interesting to read about life in New York in 1976 from a first person, contemporary point of view. It threw me off when the main character called people born in 1950 "babies". That's a few years older than my father, and I'm not that young anymore myself...

The storyline inside Elantris is great, the ones outside are tedious. Every time I start a new Sarene chapter I want to give up and read something else because her character is so annoying. What a shame.

This is the second time I've tried Alistair Reynolds and am so far just as unimpressed as the first. There are so many random, useless details and so little story. One of the characters just walked through "shark-collagen tunnels". What? Why would you make tunnels out of shark collagen? No reason that the author would deign to tell us.

So far Provenance is a huge disappointment. The main character is boring and unrelatable. The story is pure politics, but we've barely been introduced to the players or the world they live on. Thus I'm not interested in what happens next. The third human gender, complete with made-up pronouns, could be interesting but again there is no explanation for it. I know this is a grumpy update, but I expected way better.