We trust the ground beneath our feet as something solid that can take our weight, keep our structures straight, holds fast. Yes, we read things, we know about tectonics, but other than that, everything is stable. In the very beginning of Quakeland, Kathryn Miles thoroughly debunks that idea: Earth is an ocean of lava upon which very thin amalgamations of sand and rubble float precariously. What we call faults are just the largest of cracks, stable and classifiable; there are many more that we have no idea exist, fragile enough to be affected or even created by human activity. At this point, I was expecting an exciting journey through the center of the Earth. If the book would have continued as it started, it would have been a solid five stars, an educational tool to teach what most of the people have no idea about: the fragility of the thin crust we call solid ground. Alas, it was not to be.

The rest of Quakeland, let's say the last 80%, was a very US-centric analysis of how neglected earthquakes are when constructing and maintaining American infrastructure and a fear inducing series of "what-ifs" and possible disasters affecting that one country. I shouldn't have expected anything else, I mean the subtitle is pretty clear, but how can someone switch registers from talking about the very structure of the planet to the measly issues of one country and its weird measuring units? And maybe she did not use the almost ubiquitous bus size, but Miles did use the swimming pool together with the M-scale (do not let any "serious" seismologist hear you talk about Richter), the miles, the feet, the pounds, etc. The writing is competent and almost formulaic in structure, but I can't say I had any issues with it.

The bottom line is that the beginning was brilliant, the information that fracking (and mining in general) - regardless if it is toxic, damages the ground water or anything else activists throw at it - causes long series of earthquakes that affect whole areas while and even after operations cease, as powerful political and economic forces deny and actively fight the science that demonstrates this was new and important. Yet other than that it was just a normal reporter speculating about the possibilities of quakes - man made or not - causing serious harm. A lot of terribilism and fear mongering. That is why I can't really recommend this book and I will rate it as average only.

The Macht series is not related to anything Germanic, as the name might imply, but is instead inspired by the Greek Hoplites. Even if The Ten Thousand happens on another planet that has different continents and two moons and three intelligent races, Paul Kearney could have written it just as well as a historical novel set in ancient Greece, with Greek mercenaries getting hired by Persians as weapons in a civil war that went awry. In fact, the story really is inspired by an actual historical group called the Ten Thousand and the main character, with the unfortunate name of Rictus, seems to be inspired by that of real life Xenophon. The book seems to be a retelling of Anabasis.

Now, the story is well written and short. I read the whole thing in a day. It's like a 300 novel, with the courageous and lethal Macht force finding itself on a foreign continent, surrounded by overwhelming hostile forces and having to march through rough and deadly terrain in order to get home. There is a lot of fighting, technical and military, some romance, bro-mance and feudal politics, but it's essentially the story of a huge march seen through the eyes of an experienced soldier, but young and new to the mercenary troupe.

Bottom line: I don't know if I am going to read any other Macht book. This one felt self contained and I am not that much into ancient fights in the Bronze Age. I liked The Ten Thousand, though, and I recommend it as a short and captivating read.

The Luminous Dead has only two active characters: a cave diver, covered in a special suit that enhances her strength and completely isolates her from the environment, and her handler, the person who guides and provides support remotely. At first glance it's a sci-fi story, as it happens on another planet, with futuristic technology, different rules, alien lifeforms, etc. However, it starts to itch at you that with the tech that was described, the tasks at hand could have been completed a lot more efficiently and safely, so what gives?

Turns out the story is more of a metaphor than a fantastic cave adventure on another planet. Probably inspired by the death of Caitlin Starling's mother, it explores the damage done by losing your parents, the obsessions that drive the affected, the extent to which someone will go to quiet those voices in their heads. But I liked it. It's got just enough action and adrenaline to keep you going while it touches the painful emotional bits that the book was really about.

Bottom line: I urge you to ignore all technical aspects of the story. It's not that the author did not made the effort to make them believable, it's that they are irrelevant to the moral of the book. Also ignore the wild emotional fluctuations of the characters: they are supposed to behave that way. The book feels as if following a personal journal with the events of the story being just sci-fi versions of the items there.

There is a trope in fantasy writing that goes like this: young person is uprooted from their life as they learn a new skill or gain a new power, while people in authority teach them things so slowly and inefficiently that the young person needs to make efforts to learn by themselves. Harry Potter had it. The Binding has it. Only in the case of this book, the young person is someone who is always sick without knowing why, is suddenly sent off from home to be an apprentice for someone he doesn't know and while he understands nothing of what he is supposed to do. Months later and 25% of the book in, he still hasn't learnt anything, although he is always tired and exhausted for no good reason whenever he is about to. If he doesn't collapse, his mentor will! And, spoilers ahead, his mentor then dies.

So after a quarter of the book, absolutely nothing happened while I had to suffer a depressed weak and barely teenage boy who didn't want, know, or want to know anything. Bridget Collins' writing is competent and I am sure things are going to get better from here (I mean, they can hardly get worse), but I just won't continue to read the book.

Magic for Liars is one of those stories where magic exists in a hidden layer of our world, yet it doesn't bring any happiness. People are still people, regardless of their power. And what better way to explore human nature than writing a detective story in a high school for magical kids?

Sarah Gailey writes the story from the viewpoint of the detective, a woman who's greatest frustrations stem from her sister being a magician, while she is just "normal". Yet when she is tasked to find out the circumstances of the death of one of the teachers in the magic school, she jumps on it, making her realize more about herself and the relationships with family and other people.

Yes, the magic is quite incidental and the detective part quite secondary and it could just as well been written in a space academy or science lab or anywhere where flawed people have to manage each other and the balance of power between them. And while I feel the main character was compelling and the story well written, I can't quite shake the feeling I've been duped into reading a touchy-feely type of drama that I didn't really intend to read. You will not read about the specifics of magic in any kind of way; it is quite bluntly used as a tool that the reader needs not understand. You will not be amazed by the amazing feats of deduction of a fascinating detective; the main character is by definition a very normal person with a penchant for introspection and focusing on her own messed up feelings.

In the end you know the spouse did it, or the butler, or the person who flirts with the detective, or the god-like magician, or the weird kid. The culprit isn't even that important for the plot. It's all about the theoretical dynamics between the people and what makes them tick.

Bottom line: a fine investigation into the core motivations of people, woven in a rather short and bland story which purely incidentally features detectives and magic.

There are writers like Steven Erikson, describing worlds so vast that characters seem to drown in them, there are writers like William Gibson or Charles Stross, who go so far into the future that people seem to lose their relevance, yet none of them dare to ignore their characters or fail to make them interesting. Yet, that's what Sam J. Miller does in Blackfish City.

10% in and I couldn't bare reading any more of this book. I couldn't care less about the asexual person that is whining about his life, I couldn't care less about the orphan girl whining about her life, I couldn't care less about the sick homosexual boy who is whining about his life and I couldn't care less about the anonymous radio show that narrated what the city was instead of the action showing me. Should I care about all the world getting sunk under the water until the only livable places are floating megacities reminiscent of Waterworld and run by semi abandoned AIs? Should I care about the artificial drama, weird futuristic disease or the grey whining world that Miller describes? No. I refuse!

Bottom line: a poor man's cyberpunk story, with the mechanical "woke", but irrelevant to anything else, sexual and cultural references, with boring characters and a story that I had to make an effort to wade through and still didn't seem to go anywhere.

It takes the third book to see that the "hero's journey" is actually Sigrud's, even if he is the lead character only in this final book of the Divine Cities series. And yes, it is the final book, with a satisfying and very permanent ending, with no hope of dragging it on. Hell, if you consider there are three books and two cities and no gods left, you could wonder how would anyone continue the story if pressured by publishing companies.

Robert Jackson Bennett did not disappoint with City of Miracles, switching registers a little by turning the usual steampunk-noir detective story into more of a chase and revenge thriller. The villain is revealed quite soon, the mystery split into multiple little quirks that nag at you until the end of the book and a massive divine battle to top it all up. Yet I was a little disappointed with the ending. I know, rationally, that it is a great ending, but emotionally I didn't get what I needed from it, especially as I was still fired up on the penultimate chapter only to get an "aftermath" chapter for last.

Maybe it was that one of the options they employed at the end could have easily been the first and solved a lot of problems to boot. Or the fact that a lot of the grief in the final third of the book came from Sigrud not checking his kills, which is something he would never ever do. It felt a little stretched and tired compared to the other stories.

Sometimes I wonder, is it easier or harder for a writer to just abandon a world that he so carefully crafted? Is it a burden that everything that is successful needs to be turned into a trilogy or a series, or is it like coming home, writing about good friends living in your head? Either way, I am kind of grateful to Bennett for ending it all. I would have read more and more books like these if he wrote them, because I am an addict at heart, but I believe both of us can do better.

Bottom line: It's kind of difficult to compare the three books in the series. The first one was the most captivating, but also first, the second one was darker, yet in the same vein, while the last felt philosophical and like the writer wanted to get it done with. You can read either as standalone, although it makes more sense to read the whole trilogy from first to last. I recommend it and I will read more from the author.

Robert Jackson Bennett caught my attention with the first book in the Divine Cities series: City of Stairs. It was a steam-punk and magic detective story featuring a strong female character and her trusty sidekick, with great world building and character work. City of Blades is kind of the same, but slightly darker.

What surprised me in this book was that the author chose to abandon his hero of the previous volume and bring forth one that was a secondary character in that. It's still a whodunit, it's still a strong female lead fighting divine but malevolent forces. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Only City of Blades is more about the personal pain of people, their sacrifice and service, their (dashed) hopes and dreams, the promise of the afterlife.

Long story short, I was planning to read something else at the end of the book, but instead I've just started immediately with City of Miracles, the third and last book in the trilogy. I love this series!

It wasn't the writing, it is competent, without having any other redeeming quality. It wasn't the story, which is as banal as the book cover and the title, but bearable. It was the main character, a person so ordinary that he freezes whenever he is in danger, loses everything he loves several times from people who threaten him with violence and who for seven chapters, under the guise of thinking like a scientist, attempted in vain to realize what was obvious to the reader from the start. Yeah, OK, how dare he not be a superhero with indomitable courage and magical powers! I accept my part of the responsibility, however I could not for the life of me continue to read Dark Matter past chapter 7.

I am going to go on a limb here, though, and guess that the rest of the book will be just the same: a perfectly ordinary man, thrown into another world, whining about everything and not understanding anything because he clings to his idea of normalcy and refuses to adapt, only to somehow find some strength in the end and reach a partially satisfying ending. It's not really science fiction, it's just one of those "what if you would have made other choices in life" things masquerading as science fiction. I have other things to do that read about the emotional torture of a guy who is just too easily tortured. It's like stealing candy from children. I know the hero's journey starts from a state of pleasant equilibrium then something happens to upend that and the hero must fight to reach another state of equilibrium, but the initial state for this book is a boring guy living with his family and incapable of the basest reasoning skills.

So, yeah, I stopped reading it midway. Sorry, Blake Crouch!

The Invention of Nature is an ode to Alexander von Humboldt, the man who has practically invented our concept of nature, inspired Darwin and Goethe and Bolivar and Jefferson and so many others, created the ideas of ecology, Gaia (although it wouldn't be called that for some time), global connection between volcanic activity. He was among the first to popularize the idea that man's mindless exploitation of nature cannot last and will have dire consequences. The last true polymath, Andrea Wulf calls him, and on paper he seems a god: an avid reader, a great thinker, fluent in many languages, exploring on foot tirelessly until in his seventies, dabbling not only in natural sciences, but also politics, social revolution, physics, drawing, prose and poetry. He had been actively writing and corresponding until well in his eighties. The quintessential 19th century romantic scientist, he was interested in everything and anyone and wrote incessantly. At one time he remained out of money because he was paying for the publication of all his books, being interested in spreading the knowledge, not profit. He was collecting rocks, insects, plants, soil samples, etc. then he would send them to other scientists who were interested, for nothing in return.

His view of nature and the cosmos (term that he coined) permeates the vision of our society even now. So how come so few people know about him? To my shame, that includes me. I vaguely knew the name, but had no idea how grand his influence is. Wulf's explanation is that after the first world war (and I guess the second didn't help, either) an anti-German sentiment spread in Europe and America, leading to burning of books, lynching of German people and an overall erasure of anything Germanic from culture.

Now, half of the book is almost exclusively a Humboldt biography and it is awesome! I was imagining how great it would be if someone were to make a TV series about it (Netflix and National Geographic, I am looking at you!): so many details, so many adventures, so many important people of the age. I think the book would have been more accessible if it would been just that. But then the author also described some other people who were influenced by Humboldt, and while knowing that Darwin venerated the man and did everything he did from the moment he read one of the man's books, the others were less interesting or important.

Even so, the other people cover less than a quarter of the book... the rest is acknowledgements, bibliography, references, etc. Andrea Wulf did a wonderful job researching this and bringing Humboldt to life for me. Even if the ending of the book was not as satisfying as the beginning, it's hard for me to rate this any less than excellent. You need to read this!

I can't decide if Velocity Weapon is brilliant or stupid. What I can say is that I didn't like it. Megan O'Keefe tells a story of three characters: a gunnery sergeant who ejects her pod during a space battle and is picked up by an intelligent spaceship, her brother who is a member of the Prime Protectorate and does everything to find her and a thief on some other planet who stumbles upon a strange lab that changes her entire life.

The writing is competent, nothing inspiring, though, and probably that is why I had difficulty finishing the book. But there are also some features of the story that I didn't like. For example of the three main characters who start the book on equal ground, the thief gets less and less space and, worse, her story never connects to the others. It's like O'Keefe wrote a book and a novella and then merged them into a larger book, even if their only commonality is the same universe. Then there is a part of the story that I got invested in, only to be aborted midway; I can't say more without spoiling the story, but I didn't like that.

The thing that bothered me most, though, is how the plot meanders instead of getting to the point. I used to think that a good story would be less straightforward, but now that I read one that just comes and goes, gives you glimpses of the world, then does nothing with them... it just felt like wasted time. Don't get me wrong, the author builds a world with vast opportunities, a universe of multiple colonized worlds connected by star gates which are controlled by the Primes and their technology originated from an alien artifact. She is just beginning the story. The characters might yet come together, the villains might become clearer, the whole thing felt potentially epic, only one would probably have to read all of the books to understand where O'Keefe is planning to go.

Basically the book is a string of almost random events, driven by forces that are never made clear, then somehow brought together by incredible coincidence, while the characters are barely sketched and hard to relate to, especially the male ones. The world has a lot of potential, but little is built on it so far. It feels like Star Wars, a little: a galaxy far far away where everybody is related or knows each other and everything in a chapter happens on one planet only. And it felt dated, as well.

So I can't decide: is this the start of a wonderful epic universe with immense potential or is it just a stupid space opera book that is not very good? I just didn't like it.

Stranger than we can Imagine feels like a companion book to the 2002 documentary The Century of the Self. Both are really well done and discuss the brusque changes that define the 20th century and they complement each other in content. I recommend them highly to just about everyone except maybe little children.

John Higgs starts the book comparing history to a landscape and the works describing it as maybe roads. There are well trodden paths on this landscape, but also deep forests where few dare enter. He then promises that his book will try to describe the twentieth century by exploring these dark places, avoided by others. I didn't feel that was completely the case, but certainly it was a novel path to take to explain history: Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel, Lorenz, Mandelbrot, Freud, Picasso, Dalí, Joyce, Leary, Stravinsky, Crowley, Thatcher, The Rolling Stones, Miyamoto and so on. Its basic premise is that an abrupt change occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, when the general belief in absolutes (which he generically calls omphaloi) was replaced with relativism and individuality.

How would classical empires survive these changes when at their core stands the belief in a supreme leader, representing and supported by a supreme god, who protects and enforces rules that are culturally accepted by everyone? They would not, therefore the world wars that ended them. What absolute pillar of belief would survive general relativity, the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, the incompleteness theorems, the id and individualism, impressionism, cubism, modernism, postmodernism and finally, the corporation? None of them. Religion not so much dies as it breaks apart in small fragments that then fade away. Morality shakes under the reign of individual desires and psychopathic legal entities. Social norms, economical behavior, even the foundation of money are wiped out and replaced with the new. Art fractures as well, constantly redefining and contradicting itself and everything else. It is the century where value exists only when seen from certain perspectives and nothing has any intrinsic value.

The book ends with a chapter that heralds the coming of a new age, the 21st century: the Internet and the erosion of the last remaining omphalos: truth. If truth also depends on the observer, if there is no one truth, if science if just a belief like any others, what awaits us in the post-truth era?

Overall it is a very interesting and informative book. More than simply stating facts, it is the unexpected connections between things that bring value to the reader, rather fitting considering the subject. Maybe not going into the depths of dark forests, but certainly exploring their edges and the strange beings that live there. Top marks!

Deathcaster is the final book in the Shattered Realms series, or at least it should be, since it kills off the villain and has everybody live happily ever after. It's one of the least satisfying endings I've read in a long time.

Cinda Williams Chima started slowly, by creating a complex world of realms, magic and a multitude of characters and factions. She spent two books on that. The third book, Stormcaster, was about introducing a powerful and mysterious villain and yet more characters, realms and factions. Deathcaster pretty much ends it all in an until then unknown place, at a random time, for a completely random reason. Imagine Luke Skywalker walking around, playing with his sword, thinking on how to defeat the Death Star and accidentally bumping into and killing the emperor and Darth Vader both. This is how this book feels, after wading through a zillion people, with their feelings described in detail while any military or political strategy is explained (poorly) in a paragraph or two, through their relationships with other people, through their random interactions that always seem to bring them together for no apparent reason and then split them apart randomly and then the villain basically stumbling and falling on their sword.

There is nothing interesting that actually happens, no moral in any of the stories and the development of the characters is basically just beefing up and aging a few years.

Bottom line: the ending of this book makes the reading of the three previous books and this one feel like a complete waste of time. How do you rate a book that makes all the previous ones unrateable? Cinda, you're a troll!

The Flight of Morpho Girl is a short story set in the Wild Cards universe. If you haven't read the books until now, you won't know who the characters are. Even so, this story is so basic that it feels like "The Unsuccessful Mugging of Batman" or "Murder of Crows v Superman": predictable and stakeless.

That doesn't mean that the authors didn't do a good job, it's just that it is a short that brings nothing to the table other than the introduction of Morpho Girl's (Adesina, the teenager daughter of Amazing Bubbles) post cocoon form: a teenage girl with very tough butterfly wings. For me it's like a collectible item in the Wild Cards set, nothing more.

I have to admit that my expectations for this book were so high that it was probably doomed to not satisfy me. I was expecting something deeply Asian, with fantastic elements and fresh ideas and characters. What I got is something that is almost accidentally fantastical and has few cultural elements to make it fresh. Yet it does have interesting characters and, if it weren't for the plot, which meanders whichever way the author needs to further her agenda, it would have been a good book.

Joan He is American of Chinese descent (hence the name of the book?) and the culture described in Descendant of the Crane is based on an American's understanding of Chinese culture. That makes it both relatable and less Asian than I would have liked. What do I know, though? My feeling was that the author was exploring her own understanding of her origins instead of sharing something solid with the reader. There were some very intriguing ideas in the book, but they rode the story and the characters too strongly, making them inconsistent and irrational. This is an almost maybe book for me.

Bottom line: even without getting a lot of satisfaction out of it, I feel two stars out of five is too little, yet I am certain three is too much.