Youssef > Recent Status Updates

Now we have an ancient AI pimping a woma. GREAT.

Why is everyone blurting their own personal history and that of other people like this? Is it just me or it's very much unusual to tell a stranger you met five minutes earlier your marital status, your business, your ship particulars, your plans, where you grew up and that it was a slum? FFS

Pet peeve of mine: Why is the main character, who is ten years old, has been abandoned or reincarnated in an underground prison at 8 with seemingly no memories, has had no schooling and hasn't even socialized with other inmates, so well spoken? Why does he have such broad vocabulary let alone know of things like what a moon is, nutrition, what animals look like, a sea?

I WANT to like this book but the writing is not good. Too much exposition that doesn't feel relevant, but hopefully will yet to mean anything in the new game? Gamer with questionable hygiene on reckless motorbike is just cringe.

This world has basically robots and Lazer beams through magic, and yet this is a whole chapter about MC deciding on how to introduce.. Gunpowder?! He's some kind of biotech scientist, so he'd be making muskets at the very best, and yet the author is approaching it like some world shattering secret knowledge.. dude you just wrote in several individuals with WMD level powers. Ugh!

Introducing a whole new party a third in is a mistake. I feel like I wasted my time with the first party, and introducing a whole crop of new characters is confusing. I don't really want to know these kids when I have been invested in a perfectly good groupe of adult characters until now and they just disappear.

The third time I'm putting this book down and having a breather in order to continue. This is a bad case of the author just making it all up as he goes. The reader should not be able to sense that, let alone see it unfold! Needlessly convoluted yet minimally thought through. Probably a DNF.

6 hours in. MC makes bad decisions, but not very many, because between every other step we are regaled with thoughts, speculations, musings, digressions, info dumps and descriptions, so many of them. Including during active combat and flight as well.
The mimic speaks in a collection of voices in every sentence, extremely annoying and unnecessary. MC asks him not to, then just tell him to continue as is?

This is written by someone who doesn't care much for their writing craft. Characters have bizarre lacunae in knowledge, are overly familiar with their superiors in rank while on duty, or blurt out their whole agenda on first meeting a subordinate, including daddy issues. Human beings do not communicate this way.