Iain Hawkes’s Reviews > The End of All Things > Status Update

I get that the book is more setting/plot driven than character driven, but even so, I don't think it's impossible to have both.

For 'Can Long Endure', very different vibe, military sci-fi, and while the writing is stock, it's effective in its delivery and its themes - the Colonial Union is falling apart, and like any flailing empire, it's effectively turning on its own people. I will say however that this far in, I'd be hard pressed to actually name a single character from this book, and harder pressed to give any defining traits.

...all merge into themselves, at least for me. The idea of an alliance of alien races that humanity is in opposition to has been done before, and frankly, done better, because you can namedrop all the names you want, it doesn't matter if these species lack any defining characteristics. If they talk like humans, and act like humans, then what's the point?

Read a lot, a lot of stuff happened for better or worse. "Control" feels like something from Star Trek, but hey, similar tropes. "Blue pill" is still a term in the far future. The book's handling of interstellar politics is okay, in that we have a setting where Earth, the Colonial Union, the Conclave, and various other powers are sparring with each other. On the other hand, the alien species of the Conclave...

It's okay. The whole "brain in a box" thing is well done, in as much that it covers the body horror elements, plus how senses would work in such a context. On the other, definitely feels derivative of stuff like Andromeda and Doctor Who here, though of course, they don't have a monopoly on such tropes either.

This picked up a bit. I don't want to harp too much on the worldbuilding, given this is far from the first entry in the series, but anyway, it's okay. I'm kind of left to ask why Earth is separate from the Colonial Union, which appears to encompass all of human space except Earth itself, so why this kind of divide?

It's okay so far, though the setting is pretty basic.