What a wonderful book! Something that feels like a spiritual sibling of The Santaroga Barrier, by Frank Herbert and written in a similar style. The slightly outdated writing style might put you off, but the story is really interesting and well crafted.

  John Wyndham is the author of novels that were adapted by TV and movies that, to be frank, I was a lot more familiar with than the author or his books. These include The Day of the Triffids, Children of the Damned and Chocky. However, I have to say that Trouble with Lichen might be the most interesting by far.

  The plot revolves around a mysterious lichen that contains a substance that can prolong life by slowing down metabolism in a way that doesn't affect anything but growth. Independently discovered by both a seasoned scientist and his brilliant female employee, the substance affects the very fabric of human society.

  I have to admit I just took the book out of my list and started reading it. I expected some popular science book about lichens and instead I had to read a lot of feminist philosophy written in a 1930's type of English writing style. But I continued reading and I was not disappointed. Yes, the plot is not airtight and there are parts that are either anachronic or sometimes less relevant to the main theme, but the parts that are there are thought provoking and captivating.

  Some of these themes include: women fighting for their rights and getting them, only to then not use them because of societal conformism, world changing discoveries that are immediately threatened with seizure, stifling, destruction by people and organizations with power, political and economical manipulation of the masses, the danger of knowing or owning something of power and value without the proportional means of protecting it and so on. In a way, it reminded me of the wonderful movie The Man in the White Suit which also contrasts what we say we want with what would actually happen if we got it.

  Bottom line: if you get past the olden writing style and some anachronisms you will get your mind excited by some fundamental ideas underlying the functioning of our apparently benign society. I can't recommend it enough. Read it!

  One Second After sounded really interesting: what happens after a massive EMP attack disrupts all electricity use in the United States. However William R. Forstchen's writing style and the things the book was focusing one really repelled me. Have you ever read one of those American airplane books where everything happens in a small U.S. town, where people all know each other and help each other through tight social networks and they are all God fearing red blooded nationalists and everything is about how the average Joe feels about things and how they fight to protect their families? Well, this is one of them.

  Bottom line: I might pick it up later, but I wanted to relax, not get aggravated, so I did not finish it.

  A feel similar to Brandon Sanderson's Skyward series, even the writing style, The Last Human is an young adult novel with some pretty intriguing ideas that stayed with me a long time after I finished reading it.

  Zack Jordan creates a complex world of millions of sentient civilizations held together by The Network, a faster than light framework that allows all of these different species to travel the universe, understand each other and be safe from one another. However, the future of civilizations that refuse to follow the rules of the Network is dire, especially the one of the most hated race of people in the known universe: the vile humans. And of course the main character is a human teenage girl who was told nothing about her species and past and has to discover it all together with the reader.

  Many of the ideas in the book were really interesting, like the legal status of species and artificial intelligences based on the "intelligence tier" and the illusion of having control over your destiny when something hundreds of times your better decides to use you. Also the common question about which is better: freedom, order or something in between. I also liked how the author presented the way different species saw the world. A bit formulaic, but fun!

  Yet the book was not perfect. While some things in it might be considered horrifying by any degree, the plot flows like most YA stories where the main character lacks both control and understanding of the situation, therefore they're considered not responsible for the bad things happening around them. This changes a bit towards the end, but not particularly so. There is also a very interesting relationship between Sarya and her "mother", which then is just left behind and crystalized in a few McGuffins and some principles that the daughter blindly follows when the story requires it. This happens with most characters, really: they are described, used, then mostly discarded.

  The ending ended threads in a satisfactory manner, but most characters remained in the discard bin, which I didn't like. I'd say that Jordan has the writing thing down, he just needs to work more. I would read more of his stuff in the future. To me The Last Human was both a positive surprise and somewhat disappointing. A decent book, though, that I will recommend.

  The Frugal Wizard is a nice little standalone story, a science fantasy that is at once a white room story (man wakes up without memory) and a non-Asian isekai (in a parallel world derived from history, fantasy or gaming). Luckily, not a Cosmere novel, either; you know how I feel about pointless "cinematic universes". I like how these "secret projects" led to more original stories, unconstrained by arbitrary rules of fitting in with anything before or after.

  In the book, a man from a far technological future of mankind, where purchasing access to your own parallel dimension is a reality yet dollars and marketing pamphlets are still a thing, wakes up in a medieval setting without knowing who he is. His character follows a classic hero's arc - a Brandon Sanderson specialty, where he first thinks he's the hero, then finds out he is not, only to become one. The setting is a bit too silly, with a rather disappointing villain that is not fleshed out more than the typical psychotic bully, but it makes up for it with a satisfying redemption plot, some playful romance and a colorful, magical and curated version of medieval England.

  I especially liked the jabs towards the popular depictions of the era, which I hear are quite inaccurate and probably the consequence of creators copying each other until it becomes culture. Fake it till you make it, I guess. But what's with the Odin hate? Everyone seems to dislike the guy lately...

  Bottom line: medium sized book with a silly, but not overly so, premise and a whiff of the early Sanderson work that I fell in love with originally.

  This is a very Brandon Sanderson novella: the willful youth, the sardonic adult hiding their inherent goodness under a veil of insults and bad puns, the logical puzzles, the world building done while telling a concise and compelling story. The only thing that I dreaded was that it was another Cosmere story, trying to square peg something interesting into this pointless joint universe. And it wasn't! Well, not that particular universe.

  Children of the Nameless is set in the extended universe of the card game Magic: The Gathering. The novella was released for free on the website of Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Magic, through an arrangement that allowed Brandon increased creative control of the story. It is set on the plane of Innistrad several years after the events of Eldritch Moon. It introduces the original characters Tacenda Verlasen and Davriel Cane and follows their story as they seek to uncover the mystery of Tacenda's entire village being taken by geists. Meanwhile, the story is no longer available on the website, or maybe I didn't know how to find it.

  Anyway, back to the story. It was a bit on the childish side, although it featured some gruesome scenes as well. Overall it made me very interested in the characters and maybe the world. There is a "Magic: the Gathering" collection of books on Goodreads and it contains 75 works. This particular magical literary universe was not on my radar before. I doubt I will delve into it any time soon, but it's intriguing.

  Bottom line: fun, short, intense. I liked it!

  The longest of the Bobiverse series books, almost as long as the first three combined - which makes it its own self-contained trilogy, Heaven's River was... drawn out to the point of being boring. Humor and some intense scenes made it interesting, but not only did it spend a lot of attention on trivialities, it also set up some reveals that were both predictable and also rather inconsequential.

  I am not complaining that much. I still liked the book, but the things Dennis E. Taylor flags as important are weird as only someone living in the North American utopia can think of. And yes, I know he is Canadian and he is nice and a computer programmer and a sci-fi references obsessed geek, so basically a perfect human being, yet I can't take seriously the perils of financial ruination of the Bobs or the obsessions over whether the Prime Directive should be followed, enforced, and then enforced over other people, which is self-contradicting! And a lot of talking about emotional and emotion related philosophical issues and how to accommodate them and not hurt people, when everybody else behaves like self-interested psychopaths.

  Anyway, as a slight departure from the original flow of the books in the series, this is mostly about the attempts to rescue the hardware storage of one of the Bobs from an alien superstructure where aliens seem to be living an idyllic life in a pre-steam technology civilization and not a jump from Bob to Bob ad nauseam.

  The do the mission in the most time consuming and pointless way imaginable. And then there is the issue of the "civil war" which is spoiled directly in the book description, but which in the ends falls flat as a very random and implausible evolution of the situation. One thing that I found truly original and fascinating is the idea of a quantum soul. But reading the entire book just for that is hardly worth it.

  I am going to probably continue to read the series, but I would have to remember it when the fifth book comes out, which has a pretty heavy description, so I do have hope. Overall this was a below average Bob adventure. I need it to be better.

  Finally a book with an actual ending! I think the Bobiverse series was supposed to be a trilogy, then Dennis E. Taylor continued to write more stuff in the same universe, because I just started a fourth book which has as many pages as the previous three books combined. So if you feel you want to stop somewhere, All These Worlds is where the story actually ends. More exciting than previous books, but also with an underwhelming resolution.

  I mean, humanity is in dire straits. Not only did they stupidly almost killed themselves off, but now a very advanced civilization is threatening them with extinction all over again. It must be hard getting out of that one! No, it's actually very easy, barely an inconvenience! Also having the power to alter solar systems but still getting snagged in moralistic, political and even legal squabbles felt underwhelming.

  Did I mention it was underwhelming? I need the whelming! Whelm me, Taylor!

  Bottom line: if you've read the first two books, for sure you will need to read this one. But don't expect too much. More content, but less resolution.

  The Bobiverse series doesn't have actual books, it has volumes. It's a single story, or rather history, that just goes on and on without any type of marker or closure between books. For We Are Many is therefore just like the first book, but lacking the surprise factor. Just as physical and temporal scales are largely ignored, Dennis E. Taylor often exaggerates the technical ones, placing more complexity on creating life like androids than planetary system harvesters or colony ships for thousands of people. I still like the series, but it's getting blander.

  We are Legion reads as a blend of Andy Weir and Adrian Tchaikovsky: the geekiness is there, the science, the optimism, the humor, the glossing over the complicated stuff :) I liked the first book and I am going to read the others, too. It's like Dennis E. Taylor is their replicant son!

  If anything, the issue is that there are almost no stakes (yet!). The story is about a guy who is translated into an AI then given control of the first von Neumann probe sent from Earth. Then Earth destroys itself, so all that's left is Bob and his many replicas, spreading over the universe.

  Reading the book you kind of feel the power of the Fermi paradox: intelligent technological species that may have been started billions of years in the past had all the time in the world to get to us. So where are they? Of course, the biggest technical challenges of space expansion: energy and propulsion, are hand waved away with some gimmicks that makes stuff work. However, the book is geeky and fun enough to enjoy also while reading to some dry descriptions of how automated probes dismantle Kuiper belts to replicate themselves.

  Bottom line: light, geeky, fun.

  I didn't feel entertained by the first book, as it was mostly setup, but there were quite a few ideas that hinted at great things to come, so I felt that the potential for greatness was there. And indeed, The Fall of Hyperion explodes into a myriad of interwoven themes: artificial intelligence, politics, religion, poetry, the evils of the technological world, the wonder of stars, the search for and/or manufacture of God, time travel, interstellar travel, speciation, reverence for nature and the human spirit, philosophy.

  And yet, my feeling was that somewhere between the potential of the first book and this second book reveal there lies the potential for a far better story than what I've got. The Fall of Hyperion felt an old man's story, full of fear of the future, unrealistic expectations from humans, an unhealthy dependency on religion, the myth of the human spirit and last century references. Even worse, the characters were hard to sympathize with, at least for me. I didn't feel their motivations, nor did I understand the instantaneous switch from acquaintances to friends one would give their life for. The blending of vague philosophical musings and poetic references, plus a less vague description of the world which felt quite outdated didn't help.

  That's why it took me so long to finish this. To be honest, sometimes I would just fall asleep with the book in my headphones and didn't quite go back as far as a point that I would fully recognize, so basically I skipped parts of it.

  The first book felt like something someone would have written in the '70s and then thought about it and reedited it and so until its publication in 1989. The second book feels like it was written in the '60s! It's not just that I didn't understand parts of it, it's that having not understood them, I didn't feel the need to.

  And there are two books - just as large - left in the "cantos"! However, since most of the story arcs of the characters in the Hyperion books have ended, including for the planet itself, and having seen that the other books happen elsewhere (Endymion) and the third book was written six years after the second, I assume that it's basically another duology in the same universe. As such I don't feel compelled to read the last two books. Maybe they are better, but I want something else for a while.

  Bottom line: It's a very complex book, one that I am sure took a long time to consider, write and perfect. I just didn't care about it one bit.

  What a strange book Hyperion is. You can immediately feel that this is supposed to mean more than what is on the surface. People say it's written in the style of The Canterbury Tales, hence the "cantos", I guess, as well as the feel of a "magnus opus" of Dan Simmons'. The universe is very well thought out, with just the most limited technical descriptions, so it doesn't feel too dated. If anything, it is the mindset of the characters that betray how long this book has been in work for. Published in 1989, I am sure it was started a long time before.

  To me, of course, not being a reader of Chaucer or John Keats, this reminded me of fantasy more than middle English poetry or science fiction. It's a quest of a group of people, a fellowship if you will, towards a far place where a terrible dragon/wizard resides. During the travels, they share their stories, making us understand the world through their eyes and also explaining their motivations and skillset. This still was a lot of exposition for an ever shrinking part of the book where the ending was supposed to be... however the ending is not there. The book ends before the group reaches their destination. Quite frustrating!

  So many readers I respect loved Hyperion. I've read only The Song of Kali from Dan Simmons before and now with this book it's pretty clear to me that he is a great writer. He just isn't entertaining to me. Probably I should just forget any such expectations and instead try to understand, on a cerebral level, why his work is brilliant, forget about feeling good about it.

  OK, maybe I am a bit mean to the guy. I am going to read the whole series and then fully judge the series. It will be very subjective, though, disregarding the smart literary references or the poetic verses in it or whatever else that is part of the book and I will never understand or care about. So far in the book , I just read several stories that just set up what's going to happen next - hopefully - and got a feel of this brave new world of the future that Simmons saw.

  The BSCU (Brandon Sanderson cinematic universe, also known as the Cosmere) is a mistake. As far as I know there are no other authors creating stories in that universe, there is (and should be) little crossover between the worlds and characters Sanderson created and there are no movie or TV deals for other people to create content a la Marvel. It makes little sense for Stephen King, too. So when something that is quite literally a secret project completely separated from everything else Sanderson did is set in the Cosmere for no other reason than because one can, I feel it detracts from the quality and pulls the reader out of the experience.

  Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is a lovely little story about two people from parallel worlds connected to each other without their will, but finding common ground and becoming friends and also saving the world in the process. For reasons unknown, the story is told from the standpoint of a cryptic (you know, like from the Stormlight stories) and there is talk about other planets, even interplanetary travel to other places, that in the end have no relevance to the plot. There are occasional humorous breakings of the fourth wall which were completely unnecessary. There are some small inconsistencies as well, which makes me weary of this "secret project" stuff. If it's secret, who checks you are not making mistakes in the story?

  I may have been too subtle and you didn't catch it, but I hate the idea of these stories be set in the Cosmere. :)  That being said, this was not amongst Sanderson's best, but it was fun and had some elements that felt new to his work. Yes, there is romance, which he says he added more of in this story at the insistence of his wife, but there was also something else, in the way he wrote the protagonists, in the Japanese cultural influences, a feeling that even with a great author like Brandon Sanderson there is room for growth.

  I'll stop here for fear of spoiling the experience. Bottom line is that it felt a little too long for what it said and had superfluous elements in it that should have been stripped completely, but it was a fun and lovely standalone story as well.

  Firstborn feels like a golden era sci-fi story, not like a Brandon Sanderson book. Every author has these kinds of stories they just want to write down and get out of their head, but this read more like one of those old thought experiments where a character solves a '60s space opera problem with a singular solution in just the right moment. The idea of the story was really not expanded at all, the characters were not fleshed out, the dialogues felt wooden and even the moment of emotional catharsis was a bit dull.

  Bottom line: not really bad, but not good either.

  Defiant successfully captivates the reader and ends the Skyward saga in a satisfactory YA... err... way. I think I figured Brandon Sanderson out! He takes these ridiculously basic plots, like headstrong teen girl pilot saves humanity and the universe from evil alien bureaucrats, and makes them work. But how? I think the trick is that neither does he use cardboard hero/villain characters that can't change, nor does he flip them around from hero to villain and vice versa like a soft porn high school show. Instead, he makes relatable heroes and villains that are so close to the edge that it fills the reader with anticipation. Yet they will never cross that line, even while changing and growing during the entire story. It takes some talent to give your characters growth, but also a back bone.

  That is why I basically sacrificed my sleep on the altar of finishing this book in a day. Damn you, Sanderson! I need my sleep!

  There is not much to say about the plot. Some interesting twists and really lovely dialogue and prose, but the story is quite straightforward. I don't see how a sequel could be written, as all threads end in a satisfactory and definitive way, so I believe this to be the last in the series. It was fun, but it's time to move on. In that way, I am actually grateful to the author that he didn't leave me in one of those in-between states where your heart wants more and your brain thinks that would be stupid.

  Bottom line: if you've read all the books and novellas in the series, you will obviously read this one regardless of what I would say, but I will say it anyway: it was good and I am glad it's over. If you're new to this, start from the beginning, it will be a sweet ride.

  This is one of those little gems that Brandon Sanderson creates in order to further flesh out a specific character or part of his fictional worlds. It acts like a standalone, but it also enriches an entire universe if you are willing to spend the time and effort.

  Edgedancer focuses on Lift, a young female thief that also has bonded with a spren because of her potential to life the ideals of the Knights Radiant. But really it's more about a little girl who in absence of any societal education, makes the rules as she goes along by listening to her heart. Typical Sanderson.

  It's a really nice, short read with compelling characters and the usual quirky fun dialogues that say more than what appears at first glance.