dire wombat

Skip it - even fans of Cyberpunk 2077

Revisado: 05-31-24

It's a video game & TTRPG adaptation, so we're not looking for Of Mice & Men here. You expect at best serviceable writing & 2D characters, but what you're hoping for is to spend a little more time immersed in what is a really cool & fleshed out world in Night City. But it fails at this.

Narrator - Leigh is the voice actor for female V from the game. It turns out she has no range. Besides the female seductive/tough voice from the game the only one she was vaguely convincing at was an antisocial teenager with a flat affect. The rest was full of weird voice decisions, like going into a weird throaty I'm Going To Die whisper for an array of characters whenever the text implied they might be slightly stressed out. Or voicing a Japanese corporate executive like a creaky 90 year old American guy. Hamming up the exposition, etc. Really distracting.

Plot - There are 2 layers. One I'm pretty sure was someone's actual Cyberpunk TTRPG campaign, which isn't a good thing. It's a heist format w/generic characters, but like real-life RPG gaming it's all over the place from a narrative standpoint. Fun to roll dice to, terrible pacing for a novel. There is also a half-baked Neuromancer plotline that winds up... pointless. The writer pretends at nihilism (edgy!) but it's pretty clear they just ran out of ideas, which were straight-up lifted from Gibson's Wintermute & Armitage storylines anyway.

But the killer for me is there were zero interesting scenes or descriptions of life in Night City, or worldbuilding from the RPG. Everything depicted was covered 10x over in the video game, and if anything we're given *less* depth about any given topic in the book. Somehow they made Night City dull & sterile.

I give it 2 stars because I *did* finish it to see if there was a cool twist (no), but overall 12 hours my brain wishes it had back.

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An impressively tedious slog

Revisado: 03-28-24

This book starts out great - a momentous & inexplicable event occurs (the sun disappears!), and we witness scientists & other experts attempt to get over their shock and then rationally try to figure out what has happened. Making sense of the impossible, etc. That part was very absorbing.

Unfortunately, that is just the first 1/5th of the novel and quality-wise it's a monumental bait & switch. Everything kind of goes back to normal and the rest of the book depicts humanity's response, which apparently is endless repetitive political conversations by extremely lifeless characters, with scenes often put on pause so someone can explain basic scientific facts to the reader. Supposedly rational & knowledgeable characters make these bizarre leaps of assumption and come to sweeping conclusions based on no evidence. For all the talking, Baxter has no feel for how real people actually speak or think.

Plot-wise any potentially interesting story threads just meander into more 7th grade scientific exposition and fizzle into not much of anything, as does the book as a whole. Even from a purely hard sci-fi viewpoint, the speculative science doesn't hang together in any interesting way and it definitely doesn't serve the story.

The narrator has a fairly monotone female British voice, which I didn't really mind. She does not attempt to do the various accents (American, Chinese, etc) in the book, EXCEPT for some unknown reason that of an apparently black woman from Texas with a thick accent, which the narrator could not hold confidently. It was very odd considering this was just a minor recurring character and the narrator was... bad at it.

To be avoided IMO.

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Surprisingly terrible!

Revisado: 01-25-24

I figured I was the target audience for this - interested in space travel & colonization but also highly skeptical of our near-future prospects for it, plus the motives & arguments for it made by influential proponents like Musk, etc. I was hoping for an accessible look at the challenges & science of space colonization, and figured the evidence would speak for itself.

But it's so, so bad.

First off, the authors tried to adopt that forced-irreverent silly voice that has unfortunately become a trend in pop-science communication. Think Andy Weir, or Phil Plait to a lesser extent - a neurotic delivery with lots of yuk-yuk bad puns & double entendres, wacky asides, maybe an f-bomb or two to remind you they're a little edgy. But that's at least half the content here, and being narrated at the speaker's pace you just have to grind thru it to get any actual info.

That could be tolerable, but the book is actually just a screed - it has this layer of insufferable smugness, and is constantly shooting down space colonization strawmen or operating under the theme "This aspect/issue is complex and we don't fully understand it yet, so these other guys are stupid for wanting to try". Instead of letting the info convince the reader, once a paragraph they have to remind you how wrong the other side is, it's unrelenting. There is a constant "WE think" and "us" and insertion of the writers' personas, they're clearly aiming to be online personalities or influencers or whatever. They come across as deeply annoying people and not always engaging in good faith.

It's painful. I kept putting it down for a day and coming back because the material should be legit fascinating, but each time turned it off after a few more minutes.

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Serkis just nails it

Revisado: 01-25-24

This week I learned that the definitive way to experience The Hobbit is to have Andy Serkis narrate it to you.

The initial draw of course is to have Gollum be voiced by Mr. Gollum himself, but Serkis just really understands Tolkien's use of language and storytelling style. The characters are voiced distinctly and well, but it's the book's blend of casual British-style narration mixed with scene of epic scope that he brings to life almost perfectly.

The one bit of criticism I could find is that there are a couple exciting scenes where he gets a little carried away & raises his voice a little too much. But it's a must-listen for JRRT fans, and a great entry point (certainly better than the movies) for folks who have never read The Hobbit. I'm so happy to learn they brought him on board for the full trilogy.

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Military PowerPoint slides trying to be a novel.

Revisado: 08-25-23

This book will be pretty disappointing to anyone expecting a Red Storm Rising or Ghost Fleet type "what-if" war novel.

It feels like it was written from a collection of General Ryan's PowerPoints on modern trends in warfare, plus occasional characters that read like excerpts from Army recruiting brochures (invariably highly competent & totally generic, with very 2023 PR messaging). Most of the events are oddly described after they occur and in a very general nondescriptive fashion - there is zero sense of immersion, or that you know any of the characters. It's really a missed opportunity because in the hands of an actual storyteller some of the events loosely described would be quite powerful.

I suspect he was going to write a nonfiction book on the topic, and his agent suggested he write a "novel" to reach a broader audience. But his heart & skillset weren't in it. I've enjoyed General Ryan's writings & commentary elsewhere but this experiment doesn't really work IMO.

The narration is mostly competent. A couple pronunciation quirks, and weird pauses that feel like the narrator is turning a page or waiting for a new one to load.

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Tedious self-congratulation, obnoxious narrator

Revisado: 02-23-23

A lot of folks come to this book because of interest in the subject matter & the great Mindhunter show based on Douglas' experiences. Prepare to be disappointed!

The narrator wishes he was Joe Friday from Dragnet. Nails on a chalkboard after the first 5 minutes.

Most of the book is Douglas bragging about how great he is, what a stud and cool maverick dude he was growing up, and how he evolved into an elite Supercop. Lots of douchey frat boy hijinks and transparently hypocritical moralizing, mixed with cherry-picked accounts of various cases designed to make him look good but lacking in any insights that would be interesting to a reader halfway familiar with them. I was genuinely surprised how terrible this book is.

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It's... not good.

Revisado: 02-13-22

AT's Children of Time/Ruin books are some of the best sci-fi I've read in years, so I had high hopes for this one. But I am pretty sure this is a dressed-up retelling of one of his tabletop RPG campaigns. Hard to believe both series have the same author.

The characters, the races, the tech, the plot, it's all got this scattered grab bag feel to it, nothing really hangs together or gives a sense of narrative momentum. I kept waiting for at least one character to interest me, or one action scene to catch my attention, but after a few hours I bailed.

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By far the weakest of Abercrombie's books.

Revisado: 09-22-21

This series crams in enough dramatic society-changing events for 10 trilogies, but aside from JA's usual wisecracking dialogue it's done in such plodding broad strokes and so much repetitive inner monolgues that there's rarely a sense of tension or momentum. The final 1/3rd of this last book picks up a little steam, but the mood gets killed by predictable "twists" that just fit Abercrombie's earlier templates and plus major plot & characterization holes.

What really kills it are the POV characters though, which were the high point of all his previous stuff. There's none on the level of Ninefingers, Ferro, Cosca, Glokta, Monza, etc, and the new ones are either grating or all over the map - it feels like JA sketched them out and gave them each the requisite 3-4 tics but never could quite get a handle on them. Rikke is such a 1990s Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliche that I'm embarrassed for him. Leo, Gunnar, etc, you just get sick of. Vick, is there a single interesting things about her? Savine is an unsympathetic frontrunner, he tries to humanize her with adversity but it's very clumsy. I just didn't want to spend any more time with these folks, but it's a loooong book and you're stuck with them.

Characters make major consequential decisions that seem to fit whatever outline Abercrombie had for the plot, while not even noticing or mentioning obvious options B or C that would have made sense for all involved. It all feels very forced. Even a lot of the humorous dialogue he's known for feels very artificial. At the very end one character has a vision that is basically an advertisement for his next series, it's so awkward & unsatisfying.

This feels like his publisher said "Do exactly what you did in The First Law, except MORE, BIGGER! Throw in a little modern day topical stuff maybe! It'll be huge!". And it probably will be. I'm surprised at the number of fawning reviews on here, but that's fanboys for you.

Pacey is awesome as always however.

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Just a scam...

Revisado: 05-13-21

This book is just cobbled together with info that reads like it's wholesale copied & pasted from other sources, along with really amateurishly written filler content, tons of repetition, etc. English doesn't appear to be the author's first language and they don't have a fluent grasp of it. It's not really a "real" book.

Like me, you might have found it by being interested in the subject matter (in this case Celtic mythology) and seeing the near 5-star average with over 100 ratings. After I realized the book was garbage I looked into how this could possibly be the case. It appears this "author" has a whole network of low-effort audiobooks & pdfs under different names (about mythology, "dark psychology", hypnotism, cryptocurrency, "brain training", etc), plus an army of fake raters & reviewers (that I assume is just one person).

Really should be taken off the Audible store. Just ignore it.

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