Danny Metzcalf

A Modern Candide

Revisado: 09-22-24

Excellent writing in a style seldom seen in modern writing. This has the allure of comedy, good science fiction, apocalypse fiction, and Enlightenment literature. Quite the ride, couldn't stop listening. Actual sky laughed out loud and took some clips and notes of the best parts.

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I will follow Queen Zetraxia to the end of the galaxy

Revisado: 04-23-24

this book successfully makes fun of a huge number of sci-fi tropes while also having laugh out loud moments.

the story is a little bit all over the place, until you realize it pretty much follows the structure of a Star Trek episode, with setting up the story, then two parallel story tracks, plot twists and then wonderfully contrived resolution.

I found myself bookmarking and making little recorded Snippets of some of my favorite sections. I'vme been telling my friends about the really good parts over lunch!

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Hard sci-fi meets phenomenal character development

Revisado: 09-09-23

Once again, the author brings together a natural world, a theoretical world, and a different social order to both engross the listener or reader and make them think.

Well-written, and transporting for the listener. Just fantastic. Balancing marginalized people and how they contribute against a "when do we eat grandma?" level of survival need in a failing colony on a hostile planet.

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You would almost think our hero sane..

Revisado: 10-25-22

told from the perspective of the Mad mage we are brought into a world where we go along with and accept the unfathomably weird and bizarre behavior as a natural consequence of what happened to the main character in the previous book. and then as you get to the end of it you realize oh my gosh this guy took a magic wand I started blowing the f*** out of s*** on the side of the mountain for no reason and I totally had sympathy for him. An absolutely fantastic experience with an unreliable narrator (character, not John Lee, Lee is amazing), and lots of satisfying world building detail for those of us who are In Too Deep into the Spellmonger series.

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Leaves you wonderstuck thinking about the premise!

Revisado: 04-16-22

Some science fiction is just a story set with a twist, or a murder mystery in space, a romance but with cyborgs. Even hard science fiction, it's a lot of focus on a spaceship design or something and then people do stuff in the spaceship. Not for the Glorious Greg Egan! this author find a way to fundamentally shift reality, carefully backed by doing the math and thinking about the physics and the underlying axioms of the universe. his characters aren't a story with a twist, they exist in an altered reality where the fundamentals from the quantum foam up have been modified and carefully, carefully considered. Egan is one of the few authors where when you're done with the book you end up on Wikipedia learning more about the topic and a few weeks later you still can't get the premise out of your head, and suddenly you find yourself by chance talking to someone super technical or educated or whatever and you find that you came away from the Egan book with a full education and you can talk the talk with the best of them!

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How do we live across the ends of epochs?

Revisado: 11-13-21

Eagan takes the what if you lived forever immortality thinking and pushes it to the extreme. What if you really did live until the Galaxy exploded, or our universe experience heat death? suddenly, being Immortal doesn't seem so immortal! it's a tale of survival through physics and Multiverse communities.

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Love me some tensor math

Revisado: 11-05-21

Egan is the only science fiction writer who is best complemented with a tall hot coffee or tea and library access to a suite of mathematics journals. His books are not the easy jaunt of the Bobiverse, or the sex saturated worlds of Robert Heinlein. An Egan book is something you can walk away from feeling invigorated, having your understandings of physics and mathematics broadened. If you love the intellect and changing how you think, throw yourself at Egan's work and walk away a better person for the engagement.

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space caper squared

Revisado: 10-28-21

While the first book was dense, mixing novel sci-fi concepts and a fully developed world, by this book, we known the world and can enjoy all the clever dialog, be properly horrified at dystopia, and have a few very good laughs at surprising solutions to impossible problems, solved with wit and copious creative swearing. Also, House of Styx tie-in! Ahhh! Such a good book!!

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A compelling tale with non-optional math

Revisado: 09-30-21

So good. A world with two dimensions of space and two dimensions of time, where all arcs are parabolas so all spheres are parabolic. The edges of the sun scorch the earth, and being directly below the sun is a cone of darkness. The physics of the world are enthralling, and dictate the evolution, culture, and geology of an alien universe where the world is slowly and literally tipping out of balance.

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slow-building, well-crafted hard sci-fi

Revisado: 09-17-21

exceptionally well-researched, the author scientific background comes through. By embracing the most alien landscapes that are on our own planet and near-term technologies that will be realities in The xext century, an alien horrorscape that is far too real emerges. Through world-building and character development we come to sympathize with the radical weirdos and the criminals and see unchecked technological development as the enemy even though radial technological change is necessary for science-fiction to exist as a genre.

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