Flamecaster has a prince as the main character, but was named after a dragon that appears at the end of the book. Shadowcaster has a princess as the main character, but is named after a "magemarked" bard who in a random paragraph ponders what his superhero name should be. It felt to me as if Cinda William Chima intended to follow a certain pattern in her books, but then kind of abandoned it halfway. As the Shattered Realms series develops, each book adds more characters and then makes them interact with existing ones, which shatters (ahem!) any static model or recipe. There are commonalities, though.

All heroes are young, beautiful, intelligent, competent and moral. All villains are mean, narrowminded, corrupt, cruel, despicable and usually ugly. Occasionally some "gray" character appears, only to be developed later as a misunderstood hero. If it weren't for this little detail, I think the books in this series would have been really captivating. Instead... they are adorable, like a children's book that you read to see how Harry Potter and his merry gang defeat the meany. Only in comparison Harry Potter is way darker and gripping than this. And it is too bad, because I like the writing and the world building.

Shadowcaster continues the story from a moment before Flamecaster ended, from the perspective of other characters. If the first level boss was defeated in the first book, this one foreshadows (ahem!) the appearance of a more terrifying villain. It makes little sense to start with this book without having read the series from the beginning and it ends with even less closure than the first book.

Again, it is very easy to read, I've read it in a few hours, nicely split into minuscule chapters so you can read one whenever you take the shortest of breaks. I will read the entire series, I believe, yet only three books have been written so far and at least another is contracted.

Flamecaster is a typical young adult fantasy: a princeling loses the people who would guide him, thus forced to find his own way, while finding other people to guide him and using his great skills to fight the typical tyrannical villain. However, that doesn't make it a bad book. The characters are easy to sympathize with, maybe too easy, and the world is interesting enough without being too weird or requiring great leaps of belief or a lot of thinking.

I thought the title of the book was related to Cinda William Chima's name and I expected the next books to be related to fire as well, or at least some cinders, but it's the "caster" part that is important and it seems as if each book will focus on different main characters, which I find refreshing. I am currently reading Shadowcaster, which I expect to finish quickly, with Stormcaster to follow. Unfortunately, this is not a trilogy and the fourth book is not published yet. I was hoping to read the entire story start to end.

Bottom line: easy to read, reasonably well written, not too challenging.

Missile Gap is a mere novella by Charles Stross, which frustrates the reader when the story ends. The universe the author describes is so interesting and full of potential, but it is only used once, for a short story that ends suddenly and depressingly.

Well, imagine the world of 1976, suddenly finding itself transplanted on a huge artificial disk that spans enough to provide space for millions of planets Earth. Nobody explains how or why it happened and the few realities that the world has come to accept, like the ability to reach outer space, or a finite geopolitical area which can be controlled via routes on a sphere and the threat of ballistic missiles, have flown out the window. Yuri Gagarin is leading a 5 year mission of exploration on the other continents on the disk, to go where no man has gone before, while Carl Sagan is trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Are there other species on the disk? Whodunnit? Why? Very few answers are provided as ideological differences, transplant shock and paranoia, plus a few other agents that I am not going to spoil - the name Brundle is a hint, though - lead to a less than fulfilling ending.

I wish there were entire book series set on this Discworld. I love Stross' ideas and I would have loved to see how people handle the exploration of a new "outer space" which is now both more accessible and less so, due to communication breakdown. Perhaps the aliens that did the transplantation would deem necessary to bring Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro people there. That's my solution for the immediate sense of loss I felt when the story ended. It's a brilliant idea, stuck in a glass jar, like an insect specimen, only to be studied occasionally when it's feeding time. I really wish it would have bloomed into something greater.

After a period of reading only fantasy books, I've decided it was time to get to something more serious. So I started reading Roth Unbound, by Claudia Roth Pierpoint. Funny enough, the book is a biography of Philip Roth, an influential Jewish-American writer, written by a person named Roth that has no relation to him.

Anyway, the thing is I am fascinated by what people think and feel when doing things, so I love well written auto-biographies. However, this book is written by someone else than the subject of the biography and, worse, it reads like a factual history mingled with commentary on the guy's art. In its defense, it was not supposed to be a biography at all. I got to about 10% of it when I decided I will not continue reading it. And it's too bad, because from the few things I did manage to read, Philip Roth is a very interesting fellow.

Well, the bottom line is that I will rate this book low for reasons of not being able to feel anything about anything while reading other than pure boredom, regretting the interesting facts that I am probably missing.

On the bright side, there is a Philip Roth Unleashed BBC documentary from 2014 that can be found on YouTube split into part 1 and part 2, not to be confused with Tim Roth Unleashed, which is the web site of the actor Tim Roth. How many Roths are there, for crying out loud?!

The Everything Box is an old fashioned nice crook in a dirty city story. Only Richard Kadrey is a fantasy author, so the book is filled with angels, demons, magic, curses, magical police, vampires, zombies and so on. It is a fun book, one that is obviously designed to be easy and not take itself seriously. I only read it because I was curious about the author's work after reading Butcher Bird. I am happy to say that The Everything Box is much better, although maybe just because it is a bit funnier.

What I liked most was that it all starts with a quest for an item and not a quarter of a book in, the quest is over, the object is retrieved. Only it doesn't stay that way, as more and more people pile on, attempting to get their hands on it. Their incompetence and greed makes them the butts of the joke, but as the story progresses, you get the same treatment again and again: "oh, the book must be over, oh no! something else happened." Its fast paced, even in dialogues, so it goes down fast.

It's not that it's a literary masterpiece, but it does what it was supposed to do: entertain, and that is why I rate it high.

Almost a year ago I was reading Ninefox Gambit and loving every page of it. Raven Stratagem continues the story from where the first book in The Machineries of Empire series left off, but naturally the novelty wore off and I was left with just the story and the writing style... which are still great! Now I have to wait for Yoon Ha Lee to write the next book to see where the story takes me. One can still occupy oneself with the 5 short stories in the same universe until June this year, when it's supposed to be published.

One unfortunate effect of reading the book so long after the previous one was that I didn't exactly remember what had happened before. The book is still delightful anyway and can be considered as a standalone, with a little effort of imagination. I don't want to discuss the plot here, for fear of spoiling it, but let's say that while I enjoyed it and the characters, it all felt strangely aloof. Jedao's character is only described from the perspective of others, which makes it difficult to empathize with him. Even the ending feels a little bit rushed, with a grandiose effect, but little fuss over the implementation. One moment you are in a story, the next something happens that has little connection with anything else and then the book ends.

My conclusion is that either Yoon Ha Lee was unsure about the direction he was going to take the story, or he was very sure and the climax is to be had in the next book. In either case I recommend reading Raven Stratagem after Revenant Gun is published, to save you the frustration.

The Volunteer ends The Bone World trilogy. Badly. It's still better than the second book, The Deserter, but that had a plot that made some sort of sense. In contrast, in this book, Peadar Ó Guilín tries to combine the story paths of both Stopmouth and Wallbreaker, bringing together religious roof people, secular roof people, aliens and the original human tribe, each with their own psychotic would be leaders, while the world is slowly covered by Diggers.

While the world established on the surface of the planet was well thought of, The Roof was pretty much a disaster, so that is why the third book takes place on the surface again and is entertaining enough. Yet the interaction between people becomes confused, sub plots open that have no resolution (see the slime woman) and people just do random stuff that makes no sense. Even the characters chosen to die do so without consequence to the story, as if Ó Guilín didn't know which part of the story he wanted to write. The ending feels rushed and incomplete.

Bottom line: The idea of The Bone World is pretty interesting, but the story is not well realized. The first book is interesting enough, but the last two are not really worth it. If you want to read some Ó Guilín, read The Call.

If The Inferior was OK, The Deserter, the second book in The Bone World trilogy, is quite weak. The story continues with Stopmouth trying to get to the surface to get to Indrani, and while he does get there, it's not really his merit. And when he finally arrives, the world there is just as dumb and savage as the one beneath.

I really dig (pun intended) the way Peadar Ó Guilín writes about societies and people. His writing has a sort of Shakespearean quality, where everybody is looking for themselves and backstabbing everybody else, no matter how horrible or dishonorable it is. However, his hi-tech writing leaves a lot to be desired. The plot holes that were apparent in the first book, but that hinted on a technological answer from The Roof, become larger when we finally get to see it. Highly dependent on machines that do everything for them, the "civilized" people are divided into tribes that fight each other for no good reason. It is a general theme in the author's writing that people gather in tribes or churches or states or gangs with the singular purpose to blame everything on another group and then try to destroy them. However the society in The Roof doesn't make sense in almost every respect.

There is a sci-fi sub-genre, that of the uncivilized but pure reaching a civilized place and overcoming everything through strength, be it physical, moral or both, and the works from it usually are weak. The Deserter is no exception, I am afraid. In a book where information is so essential for survival, the people in The Roof know nothing, care for nothing except their stupid squabbles and are completely lost without technology. It is hard to empathize with anyone in this book that feels like filler content until the third book, which also takes place on the Inferior.

Bottom line: I've read it quickly, in order to get to The Volunteer. In my eyes, The Deserter was a disappointment.

I've started reading The Bone World trilogy because I had already read The Gray Land series and I liked it. And while The Bone World made Peadar Ó Guilín famous, it is not at the level of character development and personal involvement as The Call, yet it is still good enough.

The title of the book, The Inferior, is sort of a pun, as it refers both to a physical position and a social one and is probably a word play on "the interior". There is this world in which the only living creatures are moss like plants, some trees and insects and tribes of intelligent human sized creatures. However, their societal development is stuck at the level of the Stone Age, with their only concern being killing and eating each other. You might say that such an ecosystem could not be sustainable, and you would be right, if you didn't account for the fact that this world is under an artificial roof that acts like a sky and light source and is patrolled by strange flying orbs and whenever a tribe dies, it is immediately replaced by another, of another species, appearing suddenly in flash of light, only to either eat or be eaten.

Now, the concept and the plot are not airtight, but they don't need to be, as you revel in the life and exploits of Stopmouth, a young and smart warrior of the human tribe. One can see where the body horror that permeates The Call came from, as this world is also filled with abominations doing abominable things. Strangely enough, it is the "civilized" people that are not well defined, stuck between a mere plot device at worst and an inconsistently written set of characters at best.

Bottom line: while not a masterpiece and having the cannibalism and body horror being the only things keeping it from becoming another long lived and mindless YA TV series, it is interesting enough and well written enough to keep one going. I intend to finish the trilogy, another reason for me having started reading it being that it is a done deal, with no other book in planning.

The Invasion is the second and probably final book set in the Ireland magically separated from the world by the vengeful Aes Sidhe. Just like The Call before it, I finished this in just a few hours, both because it is a compelling book and because it is short.

In The Invasion,Peadar Ó Guilín delves deeper into the machinery of "The Nation", as the state of Ireland names itself. It is impossible not to see parallels with the historic struggle between Irish and English peoples, but if the world in which the book take place is a metaphor for that, you have to ask yourself who represents who? The Aes Sidhe have been banished by people who stole their territory, so maybe they are the equivalent of the Irish. I think that is more about how people and nations behave under the stress of conflict and ultimately end up making the same mistakes and atrocities.

In the book, after having survived The Call - a magical event that forcefully removes a child from their world and takes them into the one of the Sidhe to be tortured, experimented on, hurt and given the opportunity to make deal with the enemy - Nessa is forcefully removed from her life by the government of The Nation, to be tortured, experimented on, hurt and given the opportunity to make a deal to save her life. In the end, as the Sidhe invade Ireland, she is forced to "invade" The Grey Land, the world of the Sidhe.

While I loved The Invasion, I believe The Call to have been much better, mostly because at the time it was fresh and unique. And while I enjoy explorations of human nature, I wanted more of the Sidhe. While the story kind of ends with this book, it is not impossible to write more books in the same universe, what with the prequelitis virus going around but also continuations. I doubt it, though, and that makes me feel both relieved and frustrated. Bottom line: There is no reason to not read the two books in this series, as they are imaginative and well written.

You might wonder what a fractional number in a book series means. For some authors, it means books that are part of the universe, but not of the story, inbetween events that are defined maybe just chronologically. For others, it's even less, short stories that bring completion to their vision, different in scope, style and/or characters from the main books that maybe made you find and read them.

Unfortunately, The Slow Regard of Silent Things is part of the latter category. It is a short story about a few days in the life of Auri, the autistic-like little girl that Kvothe meets with occasionally on rooftops. Patrick Rothfuss even tells about how he came to write the story and fear people will not like it: it has no real narrative structure, it shows only boring things, like eight pages of someone making soap, it has only one character and, I assume, people will get angry for wanting more of Kvothe storytelling and getting dumb little Auri instead. And he was right. I am actually a little bit pissed.

The Wise Man's Fear was written 7 years ago! If you want to do a bit of experimentation, make an effort to name it such: "A silly little story that happens to take place in the Kingkiller universe" or "The Kingkiller Chronicle #2.001" or something like that. Instead he brings hope to readers that it's some sort of companion book, a proper bridge between the second book and the upcoming one, then smashes it with his prissy pen.

I was wondering if to rate it really low, just so I vent a bit of the frustration, but instead I settled on calling it submediocre. It's well written, but that's it. It's a literary masturbation that I recommend to only the fiercest fans of Rothfuss.

As I was saying in the review of the first book in the series, The Wise Man's Fear just continues the story began in The Name of the Wind and also ends randomly. Kvothe becomes even stronger, learns more things, is deflowered by the magical equivalent of Aphrodite and starts killing people like a maniac, yet his trials are still minor compared to his powerful abilities. As in the first book, most of his serious problems stem not from him searching for the most powerful and cruel immortals on the face of the planet, but from how much money he has in his pocket. This gets a little tiresome, but in this book we get a lot more, as Kvothe visits other places, learns to fight and adapts to strange customs in foreign lands.

There are two parts of the story that are just skipped over. One moment our hero is preparing for a long journey, with detailed descriptions of the equipment he caries, the next he is at his destination sans equipment, due to pirates and other dire circumstances that are skipped in a few paragraphs. Later on it happened again. Somehow, Patrick Rothfuss seems a little frustrated with his own speed of writing the story he has in his head. OK, that was a bit cheap, but also a bit deserved while we are waiting for the next volume.

Other than that, it was hard for me to consider this a book. It is a mere part of a longer book that would have been too unwieldy to read if printed in a single volume. It starts where the other ended and it ended with no real finality. While there is a geographical distinction between the first book and this one, it is a minor one. I still suspect that Rothfuss was planning something else with the story than what it turned out to become. Will the continuation of the story try to turn meta on storytelling, or will it continue just like a chronicle? Will the story ever reach the point when it is told or not? Frustrating questions that only a yet unpublished third volume will be able to start answering.

The Kingkiller Chronicle series seems to be, for once, an actual chronicle. In an inn in the middle of nowhere a guy actually called Chronicler comes and starts writing the stories told by the innkeeper, in reality a famous hero that just wants to be left alone. The whole thing feels like it was meant as a study in storytelling, as we read the telling of a story in which many times people tell other stories and concerns a character raised as a travelling actor.

More than that, the "shape" of the plot is a standard hero journey: young orphan boy with extraordinary abilities battles various types of evil as he grows into a popular hero. He is so talented, in fact, that he feels a bit of a Marty Stu when almost everything he encounters is extraordinary and within his ability to control or at least get out of jams with his legend intact. There are hints, though, that as it is told, the story will become more tragic. Also, as told by a talented storyteller, a reader might be circumspect of all the details in it; while improbable, it might all be revealed as a great joke by the end.

So, is Patrick Rothfuss just writing a nice bedtime story where the hero is all smart and strong and filled with magic, something to spread like wildfire and be sung in all taverns, making him a ton of money, or is it something more to it, like trying to teach the reader something that is impossible to teach? That is for the reader to decide.

I read the book really fast for its size, which shows my own preference for it, and it reads like a kind of Harry Potter in Westeros. Unfortunately, the pace of writing is borrowed from George R. R. Martin, rather than J.K. Rowling and people are still waiting for the third book in the series, more than 10 years since the writing of this one. One might want to wait until the entire story is told, as the second book in the series is a simple continuation of the first. The Name of the Wind just ends at a random moment in the story while The Wise Man's Fear continues the telling and also ends randomly. A lot of people that fell in love with the story are now frustrated with the lack of progress in writing it it. After all, Kvothe is telling it to Chronicler in three days in an inn, written by shorthand in ink, while Rothfuss has used computers for a decade already.

Bottom line: this is a well written series of rather large books. While the character feels a bit OP, the plot meanders through many interesting concepts and situations. I still have the strong suspicion that Patrick Rothfuss started writing this as a study of storytelling - an art that precedes writing and blends together artistry of composition and its declamation - but somehow ended up stuck with a character that is young, powerful, good looking and can't carry him forward. It is worth noting that while Rothfuss only wrote two major books in the series, he also wrote intermediate stories and other writers also contributed to the Kingkiller universe.

This is how I love my sci-fi: short and to the point. We still get the Charlie Stross signature nice techie guy who falls for girls in sci-fi settings, but since this is a novella, Palimpsest focuses almost entirely on the catch, the "what if" kernel of the story. And that is another exploration of what time travel would lead to, in this case an out of time organization called the Stasis that exists solely to protect Earth from inevitable extinction by reseeding it with humanity whenever it happens, thus creating a sort of stagnating but stable civilizational time flow that last for trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.

But I liked the little details a lot. As the title suggests, once you can time travel, the timelines can be infinitely rewritten, leading to all kinds of (maybe literally all) possibilities. In order to join Stasis you first need to kill your grandfather and in order to graduate you need to kill yourself in another timeline! Mad and fun ideas are in abundance in the book and I particularly enjoyed that it presented them one after another and then the story ended. No need to take it further to some sort of personal conclusion for the main character. It is pure fantasy and then it ends. Love that!

Charles Stross has a penchant for thinking big and then bringing that to the level of the average reader by the aid of pulp. That is why he is often discussing philosophical questions like what the world will be after millennia and what the consequences of time travel are or what if the Old Gods and magic were actually real in the context of a particularly handy tech guy who falls very easily in love and then spends the rest of the book saving the world and serving the one he loves. He is also an optimist who thinks people with all the information and power they could have will ultimately do the right thing with it.

While I love his positivism and the grandiose hard sci-fi approach, the pulp thing is a bit of a hit and miss with me. In the case of Singularity Sky, I think the pulp messed up something that could have been a very powerful metaphor of the state of humanity in the present day (and in any past day, too). But that doesn't mean the book is not good - I enjoyed reading it - but it doesn't even come close to another "singularity" book: Accelerando. I understand it's not fair to hold every single thing Stross wrote in the balance with what is probably his best work, but that's what I am doing, because I loved that one and I was meh about this one.

The story presents a subset of human starfaring civilization which chose to live in a similar way to the old Russia tzarist regime. Communication, technology and free speech and thought are strongly regulated and kept to the level of the 18th century in most cases. So what happens when one day phones drop from the sky that open two way communication with entities that could fulfill every desire you never knew you had? It is a very interesting metaphor to the way humans have lived throughout their history and how it is their choice and their addiction to monkey power games that keeps them in the dark ages. Also touches (very little) on why people would choose to live that way and how other might respect or disregard their right for that choice.

However, the main story is terminally fragmented by less interesting substories. Two spies, one in the service of the UN and the other helping the mysterious Herman, just have to fall for one another and waste precious pages. Feudal and imperial authorities have to spend pointless time to prepare a full military defense of their colony without even understanding who they were going to fight. Critics, a non-human-anymore species that starts the book as "criticizing" and the rest of it appears randomly and doing nothing interesting, except never getting the talking part right and sounding like Yoda. The list continues.

Bottom line: a fun read, but nothing more. A wasted opportunity for something a lot bigger. The author explains on his blog how the book came to be and why he won't continue the Eschaton series, which is probably for the best anyway.