I was saying in the review of the first book that the writing was amazing, but completely opaque to me. I didn't understand the purpose of the book and I didn't empathize with any of the characters in it. I was hoping the The Claw of the Conciliator would shed some light on the matter.

  After reading it, I am just as - if not more so - confused as after reading The Shadow of the Torturer. I am calling it quits. I can't continue to read something that brings me no pleasure, learning or understanding. And yet the writing is, without a doubt, brilliant. It leaves me with the feeling that if I only understood the genius of Gene Wolfe's meaning I would be elevated as a reader and as a human being, but as such I remain just an idiot.

  Gene Wolfe is one of those classic writers that you often find mentioned in the same phrase as Asimov, Moorcock, Le Guin and others like that, however much less often do you find a reader and proponent of his books. His writing is definitely brilliant, but after two books of this cycle I still don't know what he wants to say other than describe the weird world in which the action happens.

  The protagonist of The Shadow of the Torturer is Severian, a torturer. It's exactly how it sounds. He is very conscientious, he is part of the Guild of Torturers and he is proud to provide a service to make his guild proud. Happy to serve, not to inflict pain, but having nothing against it either. He makes friends, enemies, loses some, doesn't seem to mind it much, meets them again. There is a pervasive dream-like quality of the entire book, which pisses me off to no end.

  The world this happens in is somewhere in the vast future, where the Sun is slowly dying and the technological past has been forgotten in favor of a Middle Ages kind of organization. Technology still exists, but how it works and who controls it is completely incomprehensible and indistinguishable from magic, although none of the people see it as particularly divine, just something that is.

  Now the guy walks the land to reach another city, thus revealing this world to us. He says that his memory is infallible and that's how he is able to recount the story and all of its details, but he is also an unreliable narrator. This kind of contradiction is common in the story. The book itself is presented as some kind of manuscript from the future that Gene Wolfe merely translated to the best of this 20th century abilities. The writing is rich, dense, filled with archaic and/or imagined words and has a lyrical quality, as if you're supposed to recite it rather than just read it. Nothing is ever explained and there doesn't seem to be any overarching point to the telling of this story. It just meanders from weird situation to another, always feeling as though it's very smart and transmitting a lot through symbolism, but I never figured out what the symbols were and what they were transmitting.

  It's a very strange feeling, in which I kind of appreciate the book, but I don't understand it to a level I could call "reading". Instead I just go through the motions with Severian and hope to make sense of things, as apparently he does.

  There is a character called Dr. Talos, a travelling play writer and performer who, after a weird and opaque play that even the actors (including Severian) did not understand, split the money between the people involved, all but himself, apparently happy to just write his scripts and have them enacted on stage, regardless if anyone likes or even understands them. I feel that he is a stand in for Wolfe. The book itself feels like a play most of the time, as well.

  Bottom line: amazing writing, have no idea what it means, even if I have a pretty good grasp of the English language. I feel like this is what it would feel to read Joyce's Ulysses. They all say you have to imerse yourself into the reading and the language and multiple rereads enhance the experience. I have no intention of reading it any time soon, so that says something about how I feel about this book.

Intro

  I felt compelled to write this post because I see this phenomenon grow and take over most of the things I watch and read. In simple terms, the author tyrannically decides what will happen in their world because they start from an idea and a stand-in for themselves. Many types of pressure are contributing to them not spending time with the world they build or the characters they write.

  I start watching a series or a movie or read a book and I absolutely love it. There is a fresh idea, an interesting protagonist and things are getting intriguing. And then... either it just goes on like it started without adding anything else or the idea is shared and the story ends, only to be continued in new seasons or installments that don't seem to go anywhere at all. What is going on?

  That is not to say that creatives cannot create great work by themselves, yet that requires a level of intensity and personal maturity that is exceptional. Instead, I present a possible solution that can be applied by many, despite outside pressure.

  In the post I will use the term "game playing" to mean any form of interactive exploration of the opportunities made available by a work of fiction, be it table top Dungeons & Dragons style stuff or any other method.

Commercial pressure

  First of all, let's get the elephant in the room done and over with. Most writing involves finding an idea that can be sold. There is no benefit in creating a 5 volume outline if you don't know if anyone is even going to buy the first one. There is no benefit in trying to determine what works and doesn't work with the idea if someone already agreed to buy it. Also, if from the beginning someone - be they a publishing house or a film studio - interfere with what you are trying to create, why even bother to make it good? And maybe you wanted to tell a good story, and you did, but the only way someone accepts a commercial deal is if you sign a contract for a continuation that you never intended to write.

  These are valid concerns which I am not going to cover in this post. Each writer finds their own motivations and resources and I am not here to judge, although it comes naturally to me :)

The ones that got away

  There are some notable examples of creations that managed to avoid the issue. The Expanse is one. The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein are some others. The Malazan Book of the Fallen also falls into this category. Many others, I am sure. And they have something in common:

• they are collaborative
• they are game played

  All of the stuff above has been played, D&D style, between the world builders of those stories before it even came to publishing or adapting anything. That solved some issues that plague so many otherwise good stories:

The blind spot

  The writer sometimes focuses on an idea or desired outcome or they simply fall in love with their character to such an extent that they can't see plot holes that would be obvious for others. Collaboration fixes this with other pairs of eyes, let's call it a peer review process. Game playing it, though, elevates much higher because it expands the world in directions that the story did not cover. It helps find the questions unasked rather than just review the answers to the ones that are asked. The most important "what if?" that sparks creation is now enhanced with the "why then?" that anyone experienced when trying to explain something to a young child.

  History shows that audiences are starving for consistent worlds, for "canon", and are willing to make great leaps of faith to find one. A single logical flaw in the structure of a story may break its appeal to consumers and retconning is just a cop out, not a real solution. Meanwhile, a well thought out internally consistent narrative is loved by all.

The favorite child

  A protagonist is used to bring the audience into the story with a character that can proxy their point of view, feelings and actions inside the world that is being created. However, since this is also a stand in for the author, they gain the extraordinary powers of unbelievable luck, always walking on the right path to further the plot and possessing amazing physical and mental prowess just when required. How many times did we not watch a hero run across an open field while bullets missing them, only for then to turn around and shoot their enemies from the first shot? How many times did we see the evil faceless minions stumble, being dumb, obvious and cardboard while the hero dances around them, nimble and throwing funny quips while defeating them effortlessly? How many times did the character have to eliminate scores of evil goons before they get to the boss fight which suddenly has completely different rules?

  This is the Mary/Martin Sue character that no one can empathize with for long, yet the problem is not this character, it's all of the others. If the author is busy playing with the Rambo toy, they might not feel as invested playing with the Russian commander, consider their point of view or value system. Certainly the minions are not even worth considering, all masked, dressed alike and not even recognizing each other as individuals.

  Game playing destroys this issue before it even comes up. If you are suddenly playing the Russian commander, you will do what makes sense for you not the hero. If you have players assigned to the minions, they will gain instantaneous depth. And then the protagonist gains depth as well, as they have to battle fanatic idealists that not only fight for their leader, but have personal beliefs and want to live and have friends and family and feelings and back stories. Defeating any of them now carries meaning and moral implications. Mercy becomes an alternative, maybe even argumentative debate. Thus the story gets deeper with almost no effort.

The small world

  A galaxy far far away has a story to tell and everybody loves it. True heroes are born and fall, yet somehow they are always running into each other or are even related to each other. They fight on the same planets, say the same things and when they switch sides, the choice of sides is always the same. Within these setups, the hybrid trope feels new and creative. Wait what? A big Xenomorph with green phosphorescent blood because it came from a Yautia? How intriguing! A half-human vampire that can walk in the day? Amazing!

  This is a problem that is very much related (pardon the pun) to The Favorite Child. It's a Favorite World, the playground that the author doesn't want or know how to get out of. It's also cheaper with move sets or setup writing. Why imagine new worlds when you have spent so much time to build one already?

  Another problem can be bundled here: you see "the team" is made out of apparently very different people and you revel in their different viewpoints of the same situation. But are they really different? Once you realize that the members of the party are never in any kind of real conflict, you realize that they are all part of the same culture. There is no shock, just slight variations on a theme. It doesn't matter if they have individual value systems if those systems are only applied within the same cultural context. Then you realize that the villain doesn't have a true divergent vision either, just a different value on the same axis. Like watching a political debate between people from a country that you don't really care about. Their arguments seem pointless and the debaters more alike than different.

  Collaboration between different people fixes that from the get go. Game playing it expands the world, sometimes in unexpected places. Instead of one "What if?" you are asking many more in smaller and smaller places, which actually makes your world bigger and well defined. Instead of a few planets, a whole galaxy of worlds.

The ego

  There is something called "rubberducking", it's when you have a problem that you just can't seem to fix, no matter how much effort you spend trying to find a solution. And then you go to a friend and colleague and you start telling them about your problem. The process of translating your situation into words clarifies it and reveals the solution. Before your friend can utter a word, you have found a way out. That's why they are calling it rubberducking, because in theory you can just talk to one of those floating rubber ducks that you put in your bath tub and get the same result.

  But in practice, it's never a rubber duck, it's always another person. You talk to them after you internally admit defeat. The first step is not articulating the problem, but admitting you can't hack it and then talk to someone about it. And that's a very difficult first step, especially for creative people. In theory, game playing a world is easy, but in practice, sharing your creation with someone else is hard, accepting other viewpoints is hard, adapting to those viewpoints is hard and especially asking for help and admitting you can't fix your own thing is really difficult.

  That is why creative collaborations often fail miserably. There has to be a middle ground, a safe place of ideas, a mechanism to move things forward in the absence of consensus. Just "yes and" doesn't work. "no fucking way" is extremely important, too.

  However, while this is usually hard to arrange, setting it up as a game is less so. You can always abandon a game, no biggie. The ego takes less of a hit if are just playing around.

  How many times did you see a movie that was written, directed and maybe even played by the same person, which resulted in a self indulgent output that no one resonated with? Unfortunately, if someone is not ready for criticism they will always become a tyrant for their worlds and characters, never letting them truly shine.

Chekhov's gun

  The metaphor of Chekhov's gun has been used so much to justify trimming unnecessary parts of a story you are writing. If you write about a gun over the mantle, somebody better get shot with it by the end of the story. Otherwise, why write about it?

  But even Chekhov himself wrote about two unfired guns in The Cherry Orchard! This is not a rule, but something to keep in mind whenever you decide what you are going to write. It's not a limiting factor, only another metric to take into consideration. And then free to be dismissed. If every element of a story has a use by its end, then there is no color, no variation, no surprize.

  Instead of expanding creativity, this principle has been used to justify butchering stories in the editing room, settling for flat storylines that start and end predictably, movie and book covers that look the same and reveal the genre and often the entire plot with a single image and so on.

  The good stories are the one that someone can summarize for you and still be incredibly fun to read or watch after. Collaboration helps with this a little. Unless previously agreed, it's unlikely that multiple people will be seeing the same ending to a story, the same actions for a character and the same consequences to those actions. But game playing gets it to another level as it's generating different endings, maybe even different starting points, other characters, other locations, other problems that require solutions, maybe unrelated to the main one.

  When writing a book or making a movie, people generate a lot of extra content that is then rearranged, edited, improved, cut to tell the story in the most efficient way possible. However, the existence and breadth of that content is what ultimately determines the resulting story. With game play, you get a lot more material, much of it fun to produce and that may not induce terminal sadness when discarded. There have been cases when major roles from already filmed movies were cut completely because it was improving the story (well, sometimes that's the reason, but again, let's not talk about butchering artistic value for economic or social motives). It just stands to reason that with more material, you have more options for the better story. That is what game playing does.

  Even if you apply Chekhov's gun in the end, you pick a gun from many possible options. And this has been proven with computer games. Normally, you get a main story and then some sidelines. You have to get from point A to Z, but the game lets you explore a little some side quests that improve the experience and give you the illusion of choice. But then you get some games with very large worlds, multiplayer interaction and a minimal mythology, like online multiplayer shooters, for example. And, if successful, something wonderful happens. Bits of that experience is then translated into extra mythology! Books are written, spin-off games and stories pop up. Fans create and expand their own content. Story follows game play instead of the other way around!

Conclusion

I could have talked about this a lot more, but I decided to end it here. I think I've made my point. Characters and stories must overthrow the author's tyranny and live. I am not advocating for committees deciding the outcome of creative process - this has been tried to disastrous results, but to collaborative creative effort, supported by a framework that allows for risk and exploring of multiple avenues, even (maybe especially!) if they don't go anywhere.

Personally, I will always appreciate a playful creative failure over a serious failure to create.

Playing and creativity go hand in hand. I will go as far as to say that they can't exist without each other. Play with your worlds, play with others, let your creation breathe. Only then sell it.

  The way Hollywood works today, and by infection all other movie productions, is to measure "box office success" and usually doing it only for the first or several weeks after release in cinemas. Even ignoring that cinema is slowly being replaced with streaming, this metric is fundamentally defective. People don't go to see the movie because the movie is good, since they haven't seen it yet, but because the movie has been marketed successfully or its brand holds some power. Therefore, by using this metric, we optimize for marketing, not profit, entertainment or art. This hurts everybody.

  Some may argue that box-office also captures audience satisfaction via repeat viewings and word-of-mouth, even in early weeks, but that's almost an afterthought. To make that signal relevant, you should ignore the first week of returns, not elevate it as the most important aspect of it. Because, while it is decisive to how much money the movie is likely to make, it does not measure the erosion of overall value that it will cause to your remaining intellectual property, through reduced trust, lower future conversion, brand fatigue and so on. 

   Let's take the example of The Force Awakens. According to reviews, it was an average movie, not truly bad, but not something that the fan base were enthusiastic about, yet it was a huge box office success. The reason, though, was the good will of the fan base. They expected, mostly because that is what had been promised, the quality of the original Star Wars storytelling with the production quality of the Prequel Trilogy. And they got none of it. Because of that, the latter movies got less and less as they went along.

   Yes, there is a correlation of box-office and quality, but that's purely incidental. Let's take the same example. You spend $0.5B on The Force Awakens (plus unknown marketing costs) and you get $2B in return. You then spend $0.3B on The Last Jedi you get $1.3B in return. You say, hey, this movie earned less because it was not that good. No, it earned less because people were already disillusioned with The Force Awakens, but some still kept up hope and tried it anyway. Meanwhile, the studios saw The Force Awakens as a great success and let the same people who made it also make the second movie. Correlation, not causation!

   Movie studios, just abolish the usage of the box-office success metric! It measures nothing but how successful marketing has been and it has been pushed on you by - who would have guessed it? - your marketing departments. Moreover, the fact that marketing budgets are often obfuscated or hidden from the general public should be a dead giveaway that there is a major issue there.

  Truth is that while successful marketing may lead to bigger profits, it cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to build on something. And I don't mean re-use and abuse of existing brands. In fact, the explosion of this phenomenon just makes my point. You are trying to fix the fundamental problem of vacuous marketing by dredging up the past for anything qualitative, but in the process destroying that value.

   In short, my assertion is that the movie industry has been hijacked by the ad people and it shows:

• the quality of the productions dropped sharply
• costs have skyrocketed while been half-concealed exactly in the marketing area
• sequels and reboots have saturated output because past quality is the only thing that can still be marketed
• the movie industry has been overtaken by the game industry - which uses units sold and actual profit as a metric for success - in both profit and artistic quality
• people are tuning off movies and tuning in YouTube videos about how bad movies are
• streaming has broken the fundamentally ad driven business model that cinema system is

  This is not a post about the fossilized power structures in major corporations or against agenda driven studio interference or any other of the many nebulous issues within the industry. I am simply focusing on the most objectively toxic issue of them all: you are using the wrong metric for success! No matter what you change and what you try, unless you measure your success correctly, you will never be able to optimize for it.

  What is the correct metric, then? I do not know. A good start is to separate viewer satisfaction from immediate returns. Box-office returns muddles the difference between the two to the point it becomes deleterious. One might say that theoretically there should be a direct connection between viewer satisfaction and profits, but that only applies in time. If you build the trust and the quality, even while losing money, the viewer good will could be translated into profit later. Yes, it's a bet, but if you truly believe in the strong correlation between satisfaction and profits, how can you not take it?

  Movie industry, I wish you well!

  I am writing this on my own blog, as most of the websites I am using are crashing and burning. It's the digital equivalent of the guy surviving the nuclear apocalypse because he was living in the woods.

  You see, I previously had my blog on Blogger/Blogspot and because of an automated Japanese copyright bot I just got locked out of it one day, with no possibility of appeal to a human being, because the appeals were also handled by Google bots. 12 years a user of the platform and it was suddenly gone. Now my blog is "self hosted", which is a complete lie because I just handle my own blog code, but I host it with a Romanian hosting company. They could also be gone tomorrow just like that.

  Anyway, let's get back to the crashing and burning and the apocalyptic digital landscape of the moment. Cloudflare... err... flared. Or something. Suddenly it's returning 500 errors left and right instead of serving files. So... why should people care? Well, my chess site goes through Cloudflare. So does the tool site that edits PDFs for free while Adobe still tries to get my money for simple shit like that. The torrent files - in theory illegal - are using Cloudflare. Yes, even Pirate Bay, the site run from a file archive that you can download and host in seconds, goes through Cloudflare. So many small websites that you just think of as small independent things are actually funneled through Cloudflare. Why would anyway spend time and effort to protect their website from powerful DDOS attacks or other hacking or disrupting activities when they can pay Cloudflare to do it?

  The end of the world happened and you just didn't notice. The traditional media landscape is dominated by politically and economically controlled corporations. The Internet is dominated by other corporations, just as corrupt and, at their core, pointless. You can see efforts to control every little tidbit of information that comes to you: the defunding of public stations, the attacks on honest journalism, the laws that "protect children" by imposing rules on everything from what you say to what you see and to what you jerk off to. But there was always that idea that held in your mind: Oh, but anyone can make a website and controlling all of these would be impossible.

  Well, welcome to the future: most every little to medium website out there, small enough to not have their own Internet infrastructure, goes through bottlenecks like Cloudflare. When that goes down, the long tail goes down. And not only in the United States, but globally.

  You live in the same house, but someone has switched your foundation with something they control. Enjoy!

  Starfish is Peter Watts' first novel and it shows. It starts as something and transforms into something else, to then turn into a series, possibly because of publisher pressure. That doesn't make it less captivating, bleak and capable of getting under your skin and stick there; a fantastic debut.

  The story seems to be about societal rejects being more or less forced to choose to life on the bottom of the ocean, handling gigantic geothermal power stations which feed the never ending hunger for energy on the surface. These people are weird, yucky and very damaged.

  The main character is a victim of abuse that gets off on getting abused, surrounded by people like pedophiles, bullies, murderers, violent criminals and so on that have to somehow work together. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. However, slowly, being alone on the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by gigantic yet fragile monsters, she realizes she likes it, as do the others. Freed from the artificial pressures of society and surface environment, they almost turn into a different species.

  Then the story changes subject with the interference of the surface people who just naturally assume they know better and driven by a terrible secret. That secret leads to some extreme events which... end the book and prepare sequels. Starfish does psychopathology, brain organelles, deep marine biology, claustrophobic tension, weird romance, social commentary, deep state politics and the banality of human evil.

  Now, I don't think I want to read the rest of the series. By own admission from the author, this was a short story turned novel. I would rather reread the amazing Blindsight and maybe get to that book's sequel instead. However it was a fascinating story, being mostly uneventful, yet also never boring. How does Watts make that happen?

  I will end with the most hilarious review, from Analog magazine:

Watts’s true enemy is human stupidity, the sort of thing that turns children into walking disaster zones, treats adults as interchangeable things, insists that unchecked fertility is a good thing, and blindly trusts that our artificially intelligent creations must share our priorities. As Watts develops that point, he tells an absorbing tale set in a bizarre world and hinging upon intriguing technology. He’s done his homework well, and it shows.

  

  I said earlier that Circle of Inevitability was half the size of Lord of Mysteries. That was a lie. I only had half of the book. Probably the entire thing is going to be as big if not larger.

  It doesn't matter, though. I reached almost the end of Volume 4, where Lumian becomes Fate Appropriator and decided to finally stop. It was a good run, but whatever comes next is unlikely to bring anything new to the table. Let me explain why.

  In my previous hopeful reviews I said that "Cuttlefish" was improving his writing style, by making the stakes higher and the emotional impact more meaningful. After all, Lumian is a young man driven by both revenge and hope, marred by his sister's death, marked by two gods amongst which one is evil, having a corrupting influence sealed within him. I was envisioning a very different story arc, complete with half villainous failings, followed by righteous redemptions. Or, why not, going full villain. But that didn't happen.

  You see, I already mentioned that these novels feel like someone is telling the story of a manga or anime they have in their head. This series made me remember vividly the Jojo's Adventures series and once it was in my head, I couldn't help see the similarities. They both start with complicated worldbuilding, compelling characters and strict rules, only to devolve into a monster of the episode kind of thing, with consistency being thrown out of the window and the "smart" method for victory becoming more ludicrous as we go alone.

  I do appreciate the opportunity to delve into the Asian way of considering life and conflict, though. A stark contrast with American storytelling, the main character doesn't succeed based on luck and the strength of his emotions, but on careful consideration of the situation and preparation in advance. Even the emotional outbursts or violent episodes are actually a facade for the cold calculation beneath. Also the way in which women just can't seem to help being deferential and submissive to their male counterparts, accepting with just a little bit of dismay that they are smarter, more decisive and grow faster than they are.

  Lumian becomes a carbon copy of the character of Klein Moretti, only he "smiles warmly" instead of "smirking". There is another lesbian duo of relatively weak helpers who the story occasionally focuses a lot on for no good reason. The rules established in the first series are completely broken by a new system of "boons" from external gods, making anything and everything possible, except catching Lumian off guard or actually causing defeat. Even the connection between eras and the link between the current one and the one people have transmigrated from is different. And being a transmigrator is just a regular thing now, anyone and everyone seems to be one.

  But what's worse is that the same psychopathic behavior from the first book, where the end goal is paramount and emotion, physical pain or behavior are secondary, comes back in full force and makes the whole experience feel empty, like you are watching some random guy playing a computer game on low difficulty, always smirking about how smart he is, when the story outcome was already ... inevitable.

  Bottom line, I will rate this series 2.5 stars. It's not bad, but it's not good either once the novelty of the point of view wanes. The first one was better and this one feels like a bad carbon copy. Perhaps now I can finally focus on a real book.

  OK, so I started reading the second book of the Lord of Mysteries series. It feels more... experimental. In terms of plot, it's kind of the same, though. Same fish out of water (pardon the pun) starting from Sequence 9 and raising in level, same idea of trying to figure things out, same unexplained quirk that no one else has, even a Tarot Club further on. So, if you expected a continuation of book 1, maybe later?

  Circle of Inevitability starts really slow. Something remotely interesting only happens 15% of this first volume in. But then a lot of mind twisting events go on, ending with an epic twist that I don't want to spoil.

  For me, this is already a sort of challenge, so I will probably finish this book as I did the first, but to be honest I am a bit disappointed. I wanted to know what happened with the characters I knew, not start "a new game" with a different character hoping that maybe I will understand in a few thousand pages how the events in the first book reached any conclusion. Also, the main character doesn't work for me. An orphan saved by a "big sister", a self proclaimed prank master. And if I may pile on that, the story is ridiculous, as it happens in a small village, but with so many high level actors.

  The writing ifeels more experimental: more stakes, more negative outcomes, more emotional evolution, but not that much. The main character doesn't come off as a psychopath as in the first book, but he still veers in that direction when it comes to unbearable pain or personal loss. I personally like the grand god level magic parts, things that would turn a normal person into a quivering mess without any spiritual or mystical influence, but to have characters that just shrug things off and get on with their quest feels like watching someone else playing a video game.

  Bottom line: some improvements, some disappointments. I will continue to read the rest, see how it goes.

  There is no reason to write a post for each "volume" as I have read the whole thing as one book anyway and even the chapter separation is kind of weird, probably because of the serialized nature of the release. Well, I have good news and bad news. Good news is that I've finished this humongous novel. Bad news is that there is a sequel!! :D

  The increase in level of the main protagonist goes on. Not only does he do it faster and easier - in terms of pages dedicated to the difficulty - but so do all of his friends. But there is a catch, of course. First of all the most scary antagonist by far: God of Deceit Amon. Second of all, of course there are levels above sequence 0. And I apologize if me telling you that made you instantly go insane, it's your own fault for not raising to a sufficiently high Beyonder level.

  You see, not only are there gods in the world, but also gods from outside the world, encroaching in. There are some really complicated rules being applied and the final epic battle is truly epic, so I will leave it at that: I finished Lord of Mysteries and I liked it.

  The second book, Circle of Inevitability, closes the story completely and also is half of the first book in terms of size. I wonder if I should be masochistic enough to start reading it as well...

  In Volume 3, the story continues with our protagonist shedding yet another identity and going to Pirate Land. Well, it's called differently, but basically it's a sea full of bad and good pirates, so we're getting a bit of a One Piece vibe. The hero continues to level up with impunity, which kind of makes the story stale, but the new lands and characters are fun enough. Next time, volume 4: Back in Backlund... yeah, it's not called that, but it should have been.

  In Volume 2 the story continues, with the action moving away from the small town of Tingen to the capital of Loen, Backlund. With greater powers come greater enemies and lots of adventure. Cutlefish's style is almost the same as for Volume 1, which means that I can see the manga images in my head while I am reading the text.

  While the fun is still there, it's getting a little old. Our protagonist behaves even more like a gamer advancing in levels in a game playthrough - edited so that we don't see the fails and reloads - and other than the world building which continues to be top notch, it all starts to feel a little repetitive. Yes, the author is moving the action to another city with another culture, with different characters, and in Volume 3 he continues to do so, by moving the action in the pirate infested seas. But even that makes it feel like each volume is another level in a game, compounded by the increase in "sequence" by the lead character. It's starting to get less and less believable that a noob that started "playing the game" a few months before can easily outmaneuver and overpower mature Beyonders, powerful evil spirits, demigods and even gods.

   Yet, you know the feeling. You've read the first 10000 pages, what's 17000 more, right? But I can't stop thinking what this world would have become if the author would have collaborated with a master writer who could have given the plot the emotional depth often found in much less creative works, but necessary for fully involving a reader in the fantastical world. This could have been the Chinese Harry Potter, I kid you not.

   Anyway, going back to reading the series...

  It all started with a Chinese animation, quite nice and flashy, but also very confusing. Also called Lord of Mysteries, I soon found out that it was based on a series of books by an author with the funny name Ai Qianshui de Wuzei (translated to Cuttlefish That Loves Diving) who published all of them as web novels. So I looked for it online and I found it - on the Internet Archive no less, so I guess legally free? - in EPUB format. I had no idea how many books there are and I just thought this was the first. I was a bit surprised that it took a longer time to load than other books, but I assumed it's some weird Chinese format or something. But no. What happened is that the epub contains ALL of the books: 1400 chapters, 27000 e-book pages!

  The writing style is very direct, it's not bad at all, but it feels different from the usual Western books I have been reading, even if it is an English translation. The world building is amazing, a combination of steampunk and interesting magic, with elements from all kinds of myths - ancient and modern. The story is a bit too linear, with the main character being good at everything and being rational and good and strong and ingenious. A bit of a Martin Sue. But I've only read the first volume, so this might change. Overall, I quite like this series!

  The first volume has about 130 chapters and tells the story of a "keyboard warrior" (an Internet troll, basically) who gets sucked in a fantasy world where magic is real. And before you groan and stop reading, even if it does feel a bit like the setup of a video game, it's quite a complex world with many cultures, interesting characters and complicated magic systems. I was saying above that the animation is confusing, that's because the first five one hour episodes cover the entire first volume. It cuts a lot of things off, reorders or combines characters and storylines, so that it kind of makes sense, but without having read the book I couldn't enjoy it. Also, the animation has more of an anime/manga feel with everybody beautiful and flashy and amazing visuals during battle. The book is less so, more grounded and makes a lot more sense.

  I have to say that writing a book like this is not easy at all. The author planned a lot of it before starting writing and it shows. A lot of effort has been poured into this series and it elevates it to levels above most books in the genre I've read recently. If I have one complaint is that the character gets everything right, even if he's just a kid who spent to much time on the Internet and should have very little life experience. He adapts to the new world like he's playing an RPG game and doesn't seem to feel anything amiss. He comes off as a bit of a psychopath that way, or at least high on some sort of autism spectrum.

  I've already promised myself that if the quality of the book doesn't drop significantly, I will read all of the volumes. In fact, there is no real separation of the volumes. It is indeed a book that has 1400 chapters. So if I stop it will be because I got tired or the writer really dropped the ball. I hope that doesn't happen.

  How do books like this get this high a rating? The Wolfman is a pretentious first person narrative from the viewpoint of the werewolf, adding nothing to the genre, telegraphing all of the moves chapters ahead and ultimately being boring and uninteresting. It's basically Dexter (the books, not the excellent TV series first seasons) if he were a werewolf. Also kind of a punk retard.

  I don't want to spit all over Nicholas Pekearo here, he did write a book and it wasn't all bad, but it also was all not good. The main character comes off as an entitled prick, a coward who can't stand up to his principles, a boring werewolf, too. The story is simplistic and tedious. The world building is non existing. All of the characters, not only the main one, are weird annoying people who act like robots.

  No, this is something that, would it be the debut novel of an author, should get some "you can do better" encouragement and be done with it. I don't recommend it.

  P.S. I know that the guy was a cop and he was killed in the line of duty. R.I.P. But the book is still bad.

  Norstrilia, a contraction of North Australia, is a planet of immortal Australian farmers who export a drug that extends life and expands consciousness. They live simple lives - on purpose - as to not be corrupted by the decadent ways of the large universe around. This drug has made them insanely rich and powerful, but they refuse to leave a life of luxury, while the human world is split into those who would want their wealth for themselves and the Instrumentality, a sort of aall powerful human organization whose only purpose is to preserve the essence of humanity through any means, like for example by introducing diseases or threats or risks so people don't devolve into passive comfortable idiots.

  Cordwainer Smith has multiple strange but brilliant ideas in the book. The Instrumentality itself is something that clearly needs exploring, even if this book does not do that. There are the underhumans, animals surgically uplifted to consciousness in order to serve man and who have almost no rights. A society living in a logical extension of the American 1950 capitalism, where anyone seems to be free to do anything, but in fact they are caught in a power game with dangerous rules.

  In all of that comes a Norstrilian boy who, with the help of an ancient AI, manipulates the market and becomes the richest man in the universe, buying Old Earth in the process. This reveals the web of power in the human world and takes us on a wild journey to Earth and back.

  Typical of the era, becoming the richest person ever removes any agency from the boy. From the beginning to the end of the book, he is passively "helped" along a path not of his choosing. The fact that he might have chosen said path if he knew anything about the world is irrelevant. The fact that he feels it's a good path more akin to Stockholm syndrome. The world is huge, amorphous, predatory. Without that "help" he wouldn't have survived anyway. His body is changed to an underperson's, his mind is changed by forced therapy - for his own good, his thoughts are read and analysed, his decisions are made for him. If it weren't also for the drug addled naivete of the 1950s sci-fi, this would and should have been a horror story.

  All in all a very intriguing book that seems to combine interesting ideas, but ultimately not doing much with them. A combination of Dune, if the Fremen were Aussies, and Stranger in a Strange Land, which was also a hard to enjoy book with great drug addled ideas in it.

  Eden is a stupid book. I won't discuss the writing acumen of Tim Lebbon, because it is irrelevant to this. The story is dumb, the characters are stupid, the pretext of an eco thriller is weak as water. There is almost nothing redeemable about this.

  Let me summarize this for you: dumb liberal hippies go into an area they shouldn't have gone, completely unequipped for what they planned to do, illegally, but completely convinced they had all the right to do it, and die. Or at least I think they do, because there is no way they survive after what happens 50% of the book, unless a Deus ex Machina is employed. Wait, what? They employed one? Ugh!

  None of the characters is more than cardboard, but even so it's annoying cardboard! Entitled, emo, incompetent cardboard. There is even a former Israeli soldier who left because he saw a Palestinian parent and his children being gunned down by snipers in his army. And it makes sense, it's horrible, but even so I couldn't empathize and saw him as ridiculous because of all the people he was in the group with.

  Now, there are supernatural or body horror elements in the book, but they are like someone took them from somewhere else and slapped them over this ridiculous story of bleeding heart idiots going into a forbidden zone for no conceivably good reason. The world is a mess, people have polluted it and fouled it close to extinction, but do you know where I know this from? Exposition at the start of the book. There are "evil" guardians of the zones created to preserve biological diversity who kill randomly people who go there. Even without the supernatural element, that would still be quite OK, think of African reservations and poachers. But no, our American friends believe that anyone doing harm to nature is bad, except them. And do you know where I know this? From fictional excerpts of random sources from the beginning of each chapter.

  I could go on and on. As a basis for a number of scathing reviews, this book is perfect. Right now I am making efforts to limit the scope of mine. What would be the point of writing pages and pages of vitriolic hate about something that is the exact opposite of literature? So I stop here. This is a book written by a person inside a bubble which itself is in a bubble, hidden in an enigma of how someone could write then publish this and not realize how bad it is.