I read this book on the strong recommendations I’ve seen online, but in the end I don’t feel like I got very much out of it. This book is a collection of short stories and novel excerpts that were chosen by his fans and collected. They are presented in chronological order so you can see his growth as a writer. That is the theory. I saw a change in tone of the stories but honestly,…
When the first scene of a novel involves a starship captain covered with scratches crawling along the passageways of her ship to disentangle psychic space cats from the wiring, it seems pretty clear what you’re going to be in for, and I don’t think the first chapter mis-sells the product. This is space opera, with no effort or attempt at hard SF. Ships travel FTL through portals left behind by an ancient race, and that…
This is the 2nd half of the 2000 page epic space opera by Peter F. Hamilton. I’ll start out by saying that I read the first half, Pandora’s Star, more than 8 years ago. I did enjoy the universe and the story but I never got around to starting (and committing myself to finishing) the continuation. I’m glad I did, because I think it resolved ok, but overall I think that this was a relatively…
We watched “Jupiter Ascending” the other day. I hadn’t heard of it but it came up on a list of visually stunning movies that you may have missed, or something like that. We agreed that it was mostly vapid. The fight scenes were basically the same fight scene over and over again. I didn’t really care about any of the characters. The main characters mumbled their words and I could hardly understand what they were…