Entries tagged with au: max gladstone

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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar

This Is How You Lose the Time War

3/5. Novella of an epistolary romance between lady time travel agents of warring powers who try to edit each other's rise out of the timeline.

This is full of things I like – not just lesbians, but epistolary lesbians! Epistolary is my jam. It's honestly embarrassing how much I've written it myself. Anyway, the letters here are lovely, but the style of the whole thing is just so *gestures* so . . . styling. So we-write-letters-and-embed-them-in-seeds-for-the-other-to-sensually-consume-in-a-meaningful-fashion. Don't get me wrong, it's well executed style, all working towards a goal of engendering hunger (it's a metaphor, you guys) in people whose notions of self and of satisfaction have been eroded. And of course there are time travel shenanigans. But the stylism is just . . . so. So very. And it kept me from really engaging with this on an emotional level.

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Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

Empress of Forever

3/5. In a near future dystopia America, a queer PoC lady tech entrepreneur attempts to take over the world (to make it better, you know) and finds herself transported to a science fictional universe where a "mysterious"* empress rules all of civilization and erases any culture that gets too advanced and might attract alien predators.

I read this going is this brilliant? Or just weird? Verdict: mostly weird, and like 25% of the way to brilliant. This is stylistically fascinating – it's like the literary version of scifi anime. E.g., when a ship arrives and wants to communicate, a giant face forms on the side and . . . shouts. And when characters need to go sulk somewhere, they just go perch "on an asteroid" (like you do). It's strange and surreal and mostly charming.

And I kept probing it to see what it's really for, and getting not much back. Or not much satisfying. The heart of this book is about community – building it and learning to use it when you are, say, a tech entrepreneur with all the personality disorder that implies. And I can't help reading this entire book as a sort of laboratory of development for the main character, an extended and weird holodeck episode. Which I acknowledge is what most books are. But this one really showed you the constructed aspect of that in a way I found unsatisfying. If anyone has a different reading for what this style is doing, I'd love to hear it.

*Presumably you can spot the plot twist from this single sentence. TBF, I don't think it's intended to be any sort of surprise to the reader.

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Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A young magician is assigned with her mentor to resurrect what's left of an unexpectedly dead god.

I didn't love this like I was promised, but it's pretty cool. The worldbuilding is by far the highlight. I'm actually kind of bitter about that, because I've had this notion of melding magic with contract law in the back of my mind for a few years, and here it is. Done quite well, at least. This brief note by the author explaining his starting points gets at a lot of what I enjoyed about the worldbuilding – creative, complex, very organic feeling because it resembles one of our major systems of power more than most magic systems do.

But for all that, and the competent, smart heroine . . . eh. This never caught fire for me. I wasn't really pulling for anybody. And I should have been, since this book is full of women relating complexly to each other and striving at a difficult profession.

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