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Started great! Quickly became generic.

Revisado: 04-23-23

The book starts great. The character really resonates and the world is fascinating with fascinating rules. There are a lot of interesting questions posed as to how our main character will do more than just survive in this new world, but LIVE in it. This teases an interesting amount of potential depth to the worldbuilding, but is quickly dropped in lieu of bad power fantasy. The protagonist quickly gets plot armor and people gravitate around him for no reason. All the complex nuance falls away and what is left is shallow power fantasy where everyone likes/helps the main character for no reason and his only goal is to get stronger. Even the power fantasy elements are weak. For instance, the first enemy he faces (who has immediately murdered everything he has seen so far) decides not to murder MC so that he can murder him later... Letting him go for no reason... The entire book is all just bad plot devices and mediocre characters.

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good

Revisado: 11-14-22

it's wholesome, it's charming, it's subversive and has great characters! it's also one of the rare books that will hook you in pretty immediately. buy this book. it's absolutely worth it

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Lit-RPG that isn't mindless schlock!

Revisado: 06-24-21

Most lit-rpg is mediocre at best. Authors fail to create compelling characters because their characters are just vessels for mindless wish fulfillment. Other authors create the illusion of tension with one challenging scene and then immediately reward the main character such that he might never experience difficulty again. Dungeon Crawler Carl does neither of these things.
Carl is a well-developed character, full of proactive drive. The setting is equal parts fascinating and unsettling. Carl must juggle aspects of danger, trusting others, showmanship, and humanity.
Reasonably early on the book struggles to introduce an animal character, however just muscle through it. It pays off.
Also the narrator is absolutely on point.

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Lit-RPG that isn't mindless schlock!

Revisado: 06-24-21

Most lit-rpg is mediocre at best. Authors fail to create compelling characters because their characters are just vessels for mindless wish fulfillment. Other authors create the illusion of tension with one challenging scene and then immediately reward the main character such that he might never experience difficulty again. Dungeon Crawler Carl does neither of these things.
Carl is a well-developed character, full of proactive drive. The setting is equal parts fascinating and unsettling. Carl must juggle aspects of danger, trusting others, showmanship, and humanity.
Reasonably early on the book struggles to introduce an animal character, however just muscle through it. It pays off.
Also the narrator is absolutely on point.

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shocking.

Revisado: 10-16-20

A masterpiece but too sad for my tastes. Also I wish this had some trigger warnings.

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The first 3 were great. This one is lacking.

Revisado: 09-28-20

To open, it's important to say that I loved the first 3 books in Bobiverse. Bobiverse is almost like a choose-your-own-adventure book where you choose every choice and follow every path from an incredible inter-galactic war to overseeing the development of dark-age alien peoples. One of the two sets of aliens the author created were fundamentally different from humans and fascinatingly so! The universe was dense and rife with interesting stuff! The reader gets to fully explore a new galaxy full of wonder, culture, and peril. However:
Dennis E. Taylor has always had a problem with lacking variety of voice, but this is cleverly evaded by making every character Bob. The only other hiccup in the first 3 books was Taylor's simplistic moral framings. He constantly framed issues in overly simplistic nerd vs jock style terms and made absolutist moral judgements that were backed by poorly written villains. I rated the first 3 books 5 stars, because this was a pretty trivial issue then. It is not anymore.
This book largely deals in intergalactic multi-generational bob-politics. When an author creates an overly simplistic villain to act in unambiguously evil ways on the political spectrum, this is what we refer to as a strawman. They exist solely to show how righteous the prior generations of bobs are in comparison to the younger, evil bobs. It's a distinctly MAGA mindset. I kept reading, expecting Taylor to subvert his own conveyed expectations, but the further into the book you go, the worse it gets.
But beyond just the profuse proselytizing of the evils of the younger generation, the book is distinctly lacking. Whereas the first 3 books had a plethora of viewpoints, book 4 almost exclusively uses BOB #1 as its POV. This, if you can't remember, was the most boring bob, and also the most judgemental one. He's looking for his missing friend, and the big reveal is so obvious that you'll guess it in the first 2 chapters. They trudge through yet another society of alien life, which have no cultural distinctions from humans other than that they swim to travel instead of walk. To learn the history and the mystery of this alien culture, Bob and crew travel through the alien civilization. In several chapters, they sluggishly pick up small amounts of detail that add up to what they could have learned in 1 conversation with any local. Enter chase scenes 1, 2, and 3. These don't add much to the story. The 2nd and third add nothing, the conversations hardly even change between them. "remember not to let on that you're a robot," "oh no, we might have to bend that rule," "look at the weapons they have, how informative!"
Also, the quality of the writing has substantially decreased. All of the sudden there's crass I-killed-it-by-shoving-a-stick-up-its-butt jokes and repetitive, long, boring sections of travel that reveal very little and do nothing to fulfill our sense of explorative wonder that the first 3 books did. At this point, pretty much every bob is bored and just waiting for something interesting to pop up to engage them. Sadly this is how the reader will mostly feel.
Lastly, the bobs had pretty much concluded that they would disengage from "ephemerals" at the end of the 3rd book, but after the timeskip to the 4th, they have more to do with ephemerals than ever before. Agh.
There's no cohesiveness between books, but worse the 4th book is tonally dissonant. There is absolutely no aweing moments of the wonders of the galaxy. There is just infighting, moral condemnation, and tensionless escape sequences.


Frankly, I don't understand why this book was written.

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true to form

Revisado: 04-09-20

honestly, this book is Johannes cabal in its purest form. all the good bits condensed

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Generally good Author has got weird issues

Revisado: 07-13-19

Heinlein has got some weird issues with women. More specifically, he's got weird issues with men and how they perceive and act around beautiful women. This weird toxicity is made all the more prevalent due to the main character's motivations solely amounting to: "A beautiful woman told me to do it." Characters need agency.

Oh, and another annoying thing, why is it that when traveling among other cultures, the only relevant cultural differences are forced-sexual-fantasy-wish-fulfillment. I've enjoyed previous Heinlein works, but this book makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. I'd suggest giving it a hard pass.

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Coffee is apparently Ambrosia. The Book's Good Too

Revisado: 06-16-19

Dennis E Taylor has failed to write anything short of great. He really knows how to take an engaging concept and run with it. However, this book plays into his flaws more than any other book he's written.

First and foremost, I GET IT, you like coffee. Coffee is so important in this book, that you can immediately tell if a character is a good guy or bad guy by whether or not you see them constantly raving about it. It was quite enjoyable at first, especially in context with a bunch of college students, but the joke quickly wears its welcome.

2ndly, Dennis E Taylor struggles with voice. Almost everyone speaks in the same tone, references the same stuff, and uses the same epithets. Taylor does do a single solid Military voice as well, but everyone else from underworld thug to supergenious has a distinct lack of uniqueness. This worked great in the Bobiverse series, since every character was the main character. Here it's a contstant immersion breaker.

The ending teaser of the book has me excited for more, and I wholeheartedly endorse buying this book and every other book in this series, but if you're new to this author, get his other stuff first.

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A painful formality

Revisado: 11-21-18

So a new main character is added to this book and he provides wonderfully refreshing insight into the world that is NOT so immediately connected to the scythedom. Greyson is a surprisingly wonderful character, and in fleshing out the world we get to see all the things we liked about book 1 done even better!
However everything we didn't like about book 1 is so much worse.
Rowen wants to be The Punisher, but gets caught up in his own hubris and becomes the very thing he hates. The problem with this is that we pretty much know exactly what's coming his way from the first time we see him, but we spend hours flouting his character flaws, giving him friendly warnings of the futility and consequences of his actions, and adding to the stakes for his failure. This is more of a mid-point growth opportunity for Rowen, but every stage felt painful, forced, and left me less and less empathetic to him, because he is fundamentally a different character in this book than the character I fell in love with in book 1.


Lets not get me wrong, book 2 is probably worth reading if only for Greyson, but the more we see of the world outside of the tiny perspective we were offered in book 1, the less believable the scythedom becomes. And when you start questioning the very fabric of the premise, there's no coming back in a book like this.

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