Sunday 29 September 2013

Caliban's war by James S.A.Corey



I loved Leviathan Wakes (the first book in the “Expanse” series by James S.A.Corey). It was a good old-fashioned space opera with elements of mind-bending science fiction. It had the most interesting alien life form since Stanislav Lem’s “Solaris”. And it had vomit zombies.  But at the same time “Leviathan Wakes” was so male-centric that the journey of its main character (Holden) has never become personal for me..

And then I began reading the second book in the series, “Caliban’s War”. From the start, it was a much faster paced book than “Leviathan wakes”, and it had a very good continuation of the main story arc about the alien life form. Plus, the series progressed in the second book: where the first book’s emphasis was mostly on the space opera elements, the second book moved further and did a very good job at character development arcs. I started to care so much more for Holden as he gained few dimensions in the book 2.  The same happened with the other book 1 characters.

Besides this, several new wonderful characters were added. And few of them were female. I loved them all, especially Bobby and Avasarala. I love to see gender stereotypes reversed, and it was great to read about adventures of super-capable space marine Bobby and caustic-mouth string-pulling politician Avasarala.

I liked “Caliban’s War” so much that I would give it 5 stars. To add, the series has a very capable audiobook narrator,  Jefferson Mays. He has a pleasant voice and is really good at multi-character work where he subtly changes his voice in every chapter depending on the chapter’s POV .This is particularly welcome in a long series with many characters like Expanse.



Thursday 19 September 2013

Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

Writing in the 1st person isn’t easy as the value of the book to the readers becomes linked with the value of the single character. In the case of "Broken Empire" trilogy everything becomes binary. There are two types of people in the world: those who find Jorg Ancrath fascinating and those who don’t. I am in the first category. I have found Jorg to be an exceptionally interesting protagonist.

This said, I don’t really like Jorg. There are few things that he does at the very beginning of the series (i.e rape) that for me mean intense dislike no matter how bad his childhood was.

But do the bad deeds made him less interesting to me – no. Not at all! Mainly because I have never stopped wondering what he is going to do next and he always managed to surprise me. But also because he felt very real: arrogance, megalomania and all. I caught myself several times thinking of him as if he was a real person.

Another great thing about “Emperor of Thorns” is it's world building: it is original, detailed, consistent, complex and relatable. The science part of it makes perfect logical sense, and so does the magic part. Everything is explained and no loose ends are left untied at the ending. Beautiful world building!

There was a couple things that niggled me in "Emperor of Thorns": I thought the road trip was too long and several parts of the book could have been edited out without any detriment to the story. And to tell the truth, the book won't pass too far into Bechdel test on gender bias as every female character with more than one line of dialog is in love with Jorg.

To summarise: I enjoyed "Emperor of Thorns" and Broken Empire series a great deal.