unfortunately a page turner but imagine having made 3.5 of the coolest women in scifi and then spending the sequel (view spoiler)[claymating a dude thunfortunately a page turner but imagine having made 3.5 of the coolest women in scifi and then spending the sequel (view spoiler)[claymating a dude that died 60 pages into the first book (hide spoiler)]...more
seth dickinson is very important to me for a small handful of reasons and i will probably try anything they ever write. however. there is a shift in tseth dickinson is very important to me for a small handful of reasons and i will probably try anything they ever write. however. there is a shift in tone and scale that happens REALLY early on in exordia that i'll never get right with. i feel betrayed and respectfully i think the story buckled under its own weight.
it's not like seth didn't do the same thing in the baru series, but the difference is it didn't happen until after the first book which set up such intense emotional stakes and character work that i would've followed the story anywhere. and i did. exordia is like if the whole of traitor baru cormorant had been squeezed into the prologue of the second book.
probably this is revealing my lack of experience with reading dense hard scifi or military scifi but on the other hand if i had been interested in reading that before now i would've, and so maybe this just isn't for me and will be perfect for someone else! but the first act sets up a fucky bitey incredibly fun first contact between a woman and a cunty snake alien in new york, and then turns into a sci-fi military shooter that loses all its character and narrative momentum and contains so many US government acronyms, so many nukes, SO many quips, and so much pseudoscientific babble that even my steminist brain was exhausted. not to mention a steady flow of new characters, all with their own flashbacks and lore drops, and the HUGE ask of getting invested in a trolley problem about american intervention and murder thru the lens of two men. yes there is also a hot butch but at what cost.
it's clear that seth has a lot to say and a huge brain but all i asked for was both the protag and her mom to resolve their trauma by getting ****** by a snake hydra. im sorry i had to do it seth. seth where is baru...more
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