RogerBW's Blog

2023 SF, second of its series. OK, now we know some of what's going on. What should we do about it?

Well, there's an awful lot of discussion and relatively little doing. Some more rules of the world are put in place, and something like a plan comes together, but not much actually happens and the tension is more of the "is this a good plan" nature than "am I good enough at fighting, diplomacy, whatever, to carry it through".

Which suited me quite well, but I can see it wouldn't be for everyone. All right, our protagonists' ideas are houses of cards and nobody ever considers what they should do if some of their core assumptions are wrong, but just as in role-playing games "everyone" (except me) agrees that long planning sessions are no fun, I found myself rather enjoying what is in effect a very long planning session.

But even more than usual don't even try to start the series here; this book will have very little to say to you without the context of at least the previous one, ideally all of the greater series (and this time there's rather more connection to that series than in Salvage).