Ascolta’s Reviews > All That We See or Seem > Status Update

Ch. 44: where we see that the villain is actually a mash-up of Faust's devil and Peter Thiel, with exceptionally extra opinions on society and art.

Other whinge. The narration is awful. Liu needs to find some higher quality voice actors, for example one who knows how to pronounce "solder" and "compilation."

Summary: Ch. 2-25 = fun romp. I would have said, Ken Liu struggles with basic prose, but does action moderately well. From about the 50% there's a dramatic bottoming out. In the post half-way mark, I'd say YIKES, did he ask his chat-bot to insert a What If This Were A Bond Movie filter.

One wonders how old Ken Liu thinks someone has be to to stop getting labeled a "girl" and start being a "woman." Or really anything else besides a "girl."

Okay, I did FF through the first para, and once the story picks up, cringe prose drops. Also - turns out - a key problem is the narrator is decidedly mid.

Oh no. Did a Harvard undergrad write this with Chat-GPT for their creative writing class. Main character who devotes paragraphs and paragraphs to THE JOY OF RUNNING 😳