A friend of mine recommended this as one of his favorite books, so of course I went into it with very high expectations and of course I was disappointed. That doesn't mean it's a bad book, just that I expected more than I've got.

In Song of Kali, Dan Simmons describes Calcutta as a place of evil, in a culture of filth and senseless violence and death. He goes there with his Indian wife and their infant child when he is called to retrieve a new manuscript from a supposedly dead Indian poet. A lot of culture shock, a lot of weird mystical events and some weird and horrible people that do horrible things is what the book is about.

In 1985 this was perhaps a fantastic story, I don't know, but now it feels a little bit cliché: American man goes somewhere he sees as completely alien and where he feels out of place, usually going there with the family, so that the empathy and horror can be heightened, and where abnormal things he has no control over happen. It also part of a category of stories that I personally dislike: the "something that can't be explained or controlled" category, which implies absolutely no character growth other than realizing there are situations like that in which one can find themselves. And indeed the book is all like that: stories that make little sense, but somehow are linked to the perceptions and experiences of the protagonist, mysterious characters that do things that mean little unless the story takes them exactly to a certain point, at which you are left wondering how did they know to do that thing, and a lot of extraneous details that are there only to reinforce the feeling of disgust and dread that the character feels, but do little to further the story.

In the end, it is just some weird ass plot that makes no sense, a bunch of characters that you can't empathize with (some of them you can't even understand) and a big fat "It is so because I feel it is so", which is so American and has little to do with me. Others agree that the book is most effective when describing the humid fetid heat of the city and the inhumanity of its inhabitants and less with the so called "horror" in the text or the connection the reader feels with the characters. It brings to mind Lovecraft and his strong feelings about things that now are banal and CGI in every movie. Some are even more vehement in their dislike of the book. Here is another review in the same vein.

So how come so many people speak highly of the novel? Well, my guess is that it affects the reader if they are in the right frame of mind. My friend told me about the part that he liked in the book and, frankly, that part is NOT in the book, so whatever literary hallucination he had when reading the book I had none of it. My rating of it cannot be but average, even considering it's a debut novel that won the 1986 World Fantasy Award.

In Fevre Dream, George R. R. Martin writes about a fat bearded guy with a large appetite and a passion for food that loves to be a boat captain. Write what you know, they say. Anyways, this book about vampires in the bayou feels really dated. It has been described as "Bram Stoker meets Mark Twain", so you can imagine how much; written in 1982, it feels like written by a Lovecraft contemporary.

I love Lovecraft, but it gets worse. None of the characters in the book except maybe the main protagonist are likable. They come off as either high and mighty or ridiculously servile. And I understand that in a story where vampires have a master that can be all controlling this is to be expected, but at the same time the hero of the story, without being "compelled", still acts like a servant, enthralled (pardon my pun) by the aristocratic majesty of his vampire friend. One has to get through pages of tedious description of architecture and food and home improvement to get to the succulent part (OK, couldn't help that one) but which then feels cloyed and unsatisfactory. So many interesting characters get just a few scenes, while most of the book is how much the captain loves his food and his ship. And while it discusses some social issues, like slavery and how easily people died or disappeared at the time, it also promotes this idea of personal nobility that justifies other people getting used. This focus on aristocracy is something one sees in A Song of Fire and Ice as well, but less pronounced.

I could have given it an average to good rating if not for the abysmal ending. While at the beginning I had applauded the way the author was building tension and apparently providing a solution only to snatch it away at the last moment, the ending destroys all of it by pretty much invalidating much of the foil of the characters and a major part of the story. The time displacement also accentuates this feeling, as I thought "waited so much for this?!", and by that I mean both me as a reader and the main character in the book.

Bottom line: uninteresting vampires in a slow paced story that probably appeals to Martin fans only. It manages to insert the reader in the eighteen hundreds and the river boat mentality, but there is nothing much else to learn or enjoy in the book beyond that.

I've seen several very positive reviews of The Call, by Peadar Ó Guilín so I started reading it. A few hours later I had finished it. It was good: well written, with compelling characters, a fresh idea and a combination of young adult and body horror mixed with Irish mythology that hooked me immediately. I was sorry it had ended and simultaneously hoped for and cursed the idea of "trilogizing" it.

So the book follows this girl who can't use her legs because of polio. She is a happy child until her parents explain to her the realities: Ireland is separated from the world by an impassible barrier and the Aes Sidhe, the Irish fairies, are kidnapping each adolescent kid once, hunt them and hurt them in horrific ways, as revenge for the Irish banishing them to a hellish world. When "the call" comes, the child disappears, leaving back anything that is not part of their bodies and returns in 184 seconds. However, they experience an entire day in the colorless, ugly and cruel world of the Sidhe where they have to fight for their lives. In response, the Irish nation organizes in order to survive, with mandatory child births and training centers where teens are being prepared for the call in hope they will survive.

One might think this is something akin to young adult novels like The Maze, but this is much better. The main character has to overcome her disability as well as the condescending pity or disgust of others. She must manage her crush on a boy in school as well as the rules, both societal and self imposed, about expressing emotion in a world where any friend you have may just disappear in front of you and returned a monster or dead. Her friends are equally well defined, without the book being overly descriptive. The fairies have the ability to change the human body with a mere touch, so even the few kids who survive returned mentally and bodily deformed. The gray world itself is filled with horrors, with an ecosystem of carnivorous plants and animals that are actually made of altered humans, from hunting dogs and mounts to worms and spiders which somehow still maintain some sort of sentience so they can feel pain. I found the Aes Sidhe incredibly compelling: they are incredibly beautiful people and are full of joy and merriment, even as they maim and torture and kill and even when they are themselves in pain or dying, a race of psychotic vengeful people that know nothing but hate.

So I really liked the book and recommend it highly.

Inspired by the writings of classics like Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, Arkwright is a short book that spans several centuries of space exploration and colonization, so after a very positive review on Io9, I've decided to read it. My conclusion: a reedited collection of poorly written shorts stories, it is optimistic and nostalgic enough to be read without effort, but it doesn't really teach anything. Like many of the works it was inspired from, it feels anachronistic, yet it was published in 2016, which makes me wonder why did anyone review this so positively. Perhaps if reviews would not word things so bombastically: "sweeping epic", "hard science fiction", etc. I would enjoy books that are clearly not so more.

Long story short, is starts with a group of 1939 science fiction writers, one of which eventually has a huge success. On his dying bed, he leaves his entire fortune to a foundation with the purpose to invest and support space colonization, in particular other star systems. Somehow, this seed money manages to successfully fund the construction of a beam sail starship which ends up putting people on another star's planet. Most of the book is the story of the family descendants who "live the dream" by monitoring the long journey of the automated ship.

First of all, I didn't enjoy the writing style. Episodic and descriptive, it felt more appropriate for a history book or a diary than a science fiction novel. Then the biases of the writer are more than made evident when he belittles antiscience protesters and religious colonists that believe in the starship as their god. It's not that I don't agree with him, but it was written so condescendingly that it bothered me. Same with the "I told you so" part with the asteroid on collision course with Earth. Same when the Arkwright descendants are pretty much strongarmed into getting into the family business. And third, while focusing on the Arkwright clan, the book completely ignored the rest of the world. While explaining how they designed and constructed and monitored a starship for generations, the author ignored any scientific breakthroughs that happened during that time. It is like the only people that cared about science and space expansion were the Arkwrights. It made the book feel very provincial. I would have preferred to see them in a global context, rather than read about their family issues.

I liked the sentiment, though. The idea that if you put your mind to something, you can do it. Of course, ignoring economic, technical and probabilistic realities does help when you write the book, but still. The story is centered on an old science fiction writer who takes humanity to another star, clearly something the author would have liked to have been autobiographical. It felt like one of those stories grandpas tell their children, all moral and wise, yet totally boring. It's not that they don't mean well and that the moral isn't good, but the way they tell it makes it unappetizing to small children. If I had to use one word to describe this book it is unappetizing

Funny thing is that I've read a similar centuries spanning book about the evolution of mankind that I liked a lot more and was much better written. I would suggest you don't read Arkwright and instead try Accelerando, by Charles Stross.

I'll be honest, I only started reading the Culture series because Elon Musk named his rockets after ships in the books; and I started with The Player of Games, because the first book was in an inconvenient ebook format. So here I was, posed to be amazed by the wonderful and famous universe created by Iain M. Banks. And it completely bored me.

The book is written in a style reminiscent of Asimov, but even older feeling, even if it was published in 1997. My mind made the connection with We, by Zamyiatin, which was published in 1921. Characters are not really developed, they are described in few details that pertain to the subject of the story. They then act and talk, occasionally the book revealing some things that seemed smart to the author when he wrote it. Secondary characters have it even worse, with the most extensively (and uselessly) cared for attribute being a long name composed of various meaningless words. The hero of the story is named Chiark-Gevantsa Jernau Morat Gurgeh dam Hassease, for example, and the sentient drone that accompanies him is Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ephandra Lorgin Estral. Does anyone care? Nope.

But wait, Asimov wrote some brilliant books, didn't he? Maybe the style is a bit off, but the world and the idea behind the story must be great, if everybody acclaims the Culture series. Nope, again. The universe is amazingly conservative, with the important actors being either humanoid or machine, and acting as if of similar intellect. The entire premise of the book is that a human is participating in a game contest with aliens, and even engages in sexual flirting and encounters with them, which felt really uninspired and even insipid. I mean, compare this with other books released in 1997, like The Neutronium Alchemist (The Night's Dawn Trilogy, #2) by Peter F. Hamilton or 3001: The Final Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #4), by Arthur C. Clarke or even Slant, by Greg Bear. Compared to these The Player of Games feels antiquated, bland. Imagine an entire book about Data fighting Sirna Kolrami in a game of Stratagema. Boring.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is also the least explored: the social and moral landscape of the Culture, a multispecies conglomerate that seems to have grown above the need for stringent laws or moral rules. Since everybody can change their chemistry and body shape and have enough resources to have no need for money, they do whatever they please when they please it, as long as it doesn't disturb others too much. Now this threshold is never explained in more words than a few paragraphs. The anarchistic nature of the post scarcity society Banks described, and indeed the rest of the book, felt like a stab of our current hierarchical and rule based order, but it was a weak stab, a near miss, a mere tickle that went ignored.

Bottom line: my expectations for well renowned books may be unreasonable high, and maybe if I would have read The Game Player when I was a kid, I would have liked it. However, I wasn't a kid in 1997 and I chose to read it now, when it feels even more obsolete and bland.

The unthinkable happened and I couldn't finish a Brandon Sanderson book. True, I had no idea The Bands of Mourning was the sixth in a series, but when I found out I thought it was a good idea to read it and see if it was worth it reading the whole Mistborn series, for which Sanderson is mostly known. Well, if the other books in the series are like this one, it's kind of boring.

I didn't feel like the book was bad, don't get me wrong, it was just... painfully average. Apparently in the Mistborn universe there are people that have abilities, like super powers, and other that have even stronger powers, but use metal as fuel. Different metals give different powers. That was intriguing, I bought the premise, I wanted to see it used in an interesting way. Instead I get a main character that is also a lord and a policeman, who is solving crime with the help of a funny sidekick at the request of the gods, who are only people who have ascended into godhood, rather than the creators of the entire universe. The crime fighting lord kind of soured the whole deal for me, but I was ready to see more and get into the mood of things. I couldn't. Apparently, the only way people have thought to fight people who can affect metal is aluminium bullets, which is terribly expensive, or complex devices that nullify their power. Apparently bows and arrows or wooden bullets are beyond their imagination.

But the worst sin of the book, other than kind of recycling old ideas and having people behave stupidly is having completely unsympathetic characters. I probably would have been invested more if I would have read the first five books of the series first, but as it is, I thought all of the main characters were artificially weird, annoying and uninteresting.

Bottom line: around halfway into the book, which is short by Sanderson standards anyway, I gave up. There are so many books in the world, I certainly don't need to read this one. The Wikipedia article for the book says: Sanderson wrote the first third of Shadows of Self between revisions of A Memory of Light. However, after returning to the book in 2014 Sanderson found it difficult to get back into writing it again. To refresh himself on the world and characters, Sanderson decided to write its sequel Bands of Mourning first and at the end of 2014 he turned both novels in to his publisher. So the author was probably distracted when he wrote this book, perhaps the others are better, but as such I find it difficult to motivate myself to try reading them.

Brandon Sanderson does not disappoint with the sequel to Way of Kings. Quite the opposite, in fact, weaving more and more into the vast tapestry that is the world of the Stormlight Archive series. The characters converge towards a point in time and space where everything and anything will be decided, the fate of the entire world, with just a few courageous people standing between life and complete desolation.

Words of Radiance focuses more on the main characters, with less distractions that might take the reader out of the flow of the story. However, even if the scope of their achievements explodes, the power of their stories loses a bit of the desperation and energy from the first book. We no longer have powerless broken people trying to survive, but magical beings full of strength doing extraordinary things. Ironically, it is their success that makes them less easy to identify and empathize with. The author throws challenges in front of them, but they seem inconsequential compared to the ones in Way of Kings. I feel like he has grown attached to them and finds it difficult to torture them as a good writer should. On the other hand Sanderson is a positive person, most of this writing being lighthearted and less dark and brooding, so this is not a disappointment.

The climax is a gigantic clash between forces that have slowly grown since the beginning of the series. Sanderson does a wonderful job tying the separate strands of his world into a single story, maybe a bit too much so. The Roshar and Helaran connections felt a bit strained, not unlike Luke Skywalker discovering his greatest ally and greatest enemy are family members. The author better be careful not to put immense effort to create a vast universe, only to shrink it by mistake by connecting everything with everything and everybody with everybody.

And again the final pages of the book feel weak, as they come after the powerful climax, yet they are necessary to tie in some story arks and seed the beginning of others. Yes, the book ends with a promise that what happened in it is just the mere beginning, a small part of the larger picture, so expect little closure. Sanderdon is a prolific author and I am sure he will write the next books in the series fast enough to keep me engaged, but be aware the series is planned to be at least ten main books with about just as much companion stories and novels. This... will take a while. Oathbringer, the third book, is scheduled to be released in November 2017.

Bottom line: I recommend the book and the series and the author. No fantasy reader should ignore Brandon Sanderson if they are anything like me. Just make sure you are ready to get invested in the story only to wait every year for the next chapter to be released.

Brandon Sanderson proves again he is a brilliant writer. His Stormlight universe is not only vast and imaginative, but the characters are both compelling and well written.

Way of the Kings has some slow parts, though, and even if I kind of liked that, it is uneven in regards to its characters: some get more focus, some just a few chapters. That means that if you identify with the lead characters you will enjoy the book, but if you empathize with the lesser ones you will probably get frustrated.

I particularly enjoyed the climax. It was as it should be: the tension was rising and Sanderson just wouldn't let it go, it just kept pushing it and pushing it, filling in the motivations of the character, adding burden upon burden, making choices as difficult and as important as possible before finally allowing the release of his characters making one. Alas, the wonderful ending is followed by epilogues, several of them, which just seem boring afterwards, in comparison.

Great series, though, I recommend it highly.

Having been so pleasantly surprised by First Light, the first book in The Red series, I quickly read the next two books: The Trials and Going Dark. However, possibly due to my high expectations, I have been disappointed by the continuation. Linda Nagata seemed to have reached that sweet spot between current tech trends and emergent future that makes stories feel both hard sci-fi and realistic. The integration between man and machine, the politics run by shadowy megarich "dragons" from the background, nuclear bombs detonated in major US cities, artificial intelligence and so on. The potential was immense!

Yet, the author chose to continue the story on the same flat note, like an ode to the Stockholm Syndrome, where the hero gets repeatedly coerced to run missions that at first seem bullshit, but in the end are rationalized as necessary and even dutiful by himself. The common intrusion of external forces into his emotional balance by way of direct brain stimulation also makes his feelings and motivations be completely isolated from the ones of the reader. A strange choice, considering the vast possibilities opened by the first book. Frankly, it felt like Nagata liked writing the first book and then was forced by publishers to make it "a trilogy", since that is the norm for fantasy and science fiction, but her heart wasn't really in it.

I don't want to spoil the ending, such as it is, but I will say it was disappointing as well, with no real closure for the reader of any of the important questions raised in First Light. Too bad, since I felt the story was beginning to touch on important subjects that needed to be discussed at a deeper level than just "boots on the ground".

First Light is Linda Nagata's first book in The Red series, which follows a military man landing right into the middle of an emergence event. Stuck between his duty as a soldier, his love for his girlfriend and father, the maniacal ambitions of an all powerful defense contractor queen and a mysterious God-like entity which seems to like him, our hero does what he can to survive and do good by his own principles.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those cheap soldiering books. It was short, written by a woman, and frankly I expected a standard pulp fiction "read it on a train" kind of thing. Instead I was blown away by the subtlety with which the characters are being explored and the way the story was constructed. I loved the book and I plan to read all the series. I started reading The Dread Hammer, which is another Nagata book, this time fantasy, but it doesn't even come close to First Light. I may even dislike it.

Anyway, I can't say much about the plot without spoiling it, but I can certainly recommend this book. As I said, it is short enough to read and see if it evokes the same feelings. Instead of hurting it, the female perspective of the author enhances the experience and makes it unique. The technical aspects are spot on and the writing style is fluid and easy to read. Top marks!

Tad Williams probably fancies himself as another Tolkien: he writes long decriptions of lands and people and languages, shows us poetry and songs, tells us about the rich history of the land. And all of this while we follow yet another common, but good boy, with a mysterious ancestry, while he and his merry band of helpers fight THE DARK ONE. It's the same old story, with the hapless youth that is guided by wise but not forthcoming people who tend to die, leave or otherwise shut up before the hero gets the whole story and can do anything about it. Regardless, he is young and lucky, so it's OK.

If The Dragonbone Chair would have been fun or interesting or at least show us a character that we could care about, this book would have been readable. As such it's a trope filled, boring and sleep inducing thing. You have to wait until half of the book to see the things that you predicted would happen from the first few chapters. I couldn't even finish it. More than two thirds in the book and there is no significant part of the story that involves either dragons or chairs.

Bottom line: it sucks!

I got this bundle of four books in the Alcatraz series, by Brandon Sanderson, and since I loved all of his books so far, I enthusiastically started to read them. First, you need to understand that there are five books in the series, with The Dark Talent just published. I think it pays to wait until you have it before you read the whole thing, since it pretty much reads as one long story (unless you read the beginning and then immediately skip to the end of each book, heh heh heh!). Second, you need to know that at the beginning the writing will appear waaaay too silly and under par compared to the author's other works. After a while it kind of grew on me, but be aware that it is written mostly for kids. Sanderson even says so in the story itself.

So at first I kind of thought this will be the series that breaks the rule, the one that I would not enjoy reading, and it took some time to shake off this feeling. It feels like the author could not make up his mind on what to write: the obligatory book about writers (after all, the rule says "write what you know", so in the end it's inevitable) or the recently obligatory Harry Potter spoof (which fantasy authors are peer pressured into writing). In the end he wrote something that has both: a story about a boy discovering he has magical powers and also a book filled with meta comments and breaks in the Fourth Wall (the character has the Breaking Talent, see) that shows some of the tools and processes in the writing business.

In fact, the more I read, the more I enjoyed the books. The characters are as always incredibly (annoyingly) positive and there is that Sanderson smartness behind even the silliest of exchanges. He references future scenes, with book and page number (which is amazing if you think about it), he hooks you to a scene then berates himself on using hooks in the book, he uses really silly and out of context details only to use them at full effectiveness a book later. In the end, you get something that children will undoubtedly read with giggling pleasure and that adults (especially those interested in writing) will see as a deconstruction of the writing process.

Now, I still feel the Alcatraz series is one of the lesser Brandon Sanderson books. The silliness sometimes feels forced and the way he writes each book changes slightly, as he experiments with the crazy shenanigans that he started with this series. It's still very entertaining, though. Give it a try, or give it to your children so they can get into writing themselves and make your life a living hell when they grow up :)

@BrandSanderson I apologize for writing four reviews of your books and still calling you Brian for some reason. :)

— Siderite Zackwehdex (@Siderite) September 11, 2016

The Emperor's Soul is set in the same world as Elantris, but for all intents and purposes it is a standalone story. It's not a full size book, but it's a bit longer than a short story. In it we find a type of magic called Forging, by which someone can carve and use a complicated seal to change the history of an object or, indeed, a soul. The forging needs to be very precise and as close as possible to the actual history of the target, otherwise the magic doesn't "stick". So what must a brilliant forger do in order to do the forbidden soul forging? They must know their target so intimately that they can't ultimately hurt them.
An intriguing idea, yet Brandon Sanderson does what he does best and focuses on the characters, while the story itself reveals the underlying motivation of each and how it affects the final outcome. The descriptions are minimal and the ending is optimistic and personal as Sanderson often likes his finales.
Since the story is short and I had no trouble reading it in a single evening, it is almost a pity not to read it, even if in itself is just a tiny "what if" tale and offers nothing spectacular.

I've read the book in a day. Just like the other two in the series (Steelheart and Firefight), I was caught up in the rhythm of the characters and the overwhelming positivity of the protagonist. Perhaps strange, I kind of missed descriptions in this one, as both locations and characters were left to the imagination and everything was action and dialogue.

Brandon Sanderson ends (why!!?? Whyy?!!?) the Reckoners series with this third book called Calamity. You absolutely have to read the other two books to understand anything about it. In fact, Reckoners feels more like a single story released in three installments than a true trilogy. In it, the team has to reckon (heh heh heh) with their leader going rogue and have a decision to make: either bring him back or kill him. All this while fighting off various Epics in different stages of madness.

I can't really say anything about the story without spoiling the hell out of it. I loved the first two books and I loved this one. Indeed, I have yet to find a Brandon Sanderson book that I don't like. If you are into superhero stories, the Reckoners series has a refreshingly original plot, a wonderful main character and true debate about what heroism really is. I recommend it highly!