book review: The Golden Transcendence

by: John C. Wright

AKA “The Philosophy War”.  Sorry, had to get that out of the way.   Sure, there are physical things happening – stuff blows up, crazy technologies baffle, loves are found and found again, secrets are revealed – you know, stuff that happens in books.  BUT, the core conflict or, rather, the conflict at the (super-dense) core of the climactic central scene, is one of philosophy and self-doubt.  Man vs. Machine-as-Man converted to Man vs. Self by a clever enemy.  Also, not unheard of.  But the depths that Wright goes to here…

Sadly, I lack the background or the attention span to evaluate the quality or depth of the philosophy expressed here but I will say that, for the sake of the story, it was fine.  I don’t quite understand a couple of the potential rationales for some of it (was the argument that a setting with illogical physics would produce illogical philosophy?)

All-in-all though, I found it much more engaging than book two – at least as engaging as the first book, IIRC – and a worthwhile read.  Lots of fanciful, fantastic bits of technology and projection in there, like much of the sci-fi that I love.  And many twists… not cheesy twists either but generally interesting and thought provoking twists.

THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS

Good stuff.

book review: The Phoenix Exultant

by: John C. Wright

I wanted this book to be so much better.  I mean, it wasn’t necessarily bad, but it didn’t compare as well as I hoped to the first volume.

Some of my issues were just pure artistic choices – he spent (what felt like, but maybe wasn’t) multiple chapters with Phaethon trying to find the right person to beg for money.  I mean, sure that’s a valid solution to his predicament…but it struck me as kind of stupid and weak.   I mean, he’s got his armor and all kinds of raw materials, can’t he just start nanoassembling shit?  Hell, make a ship out of seawater…. I don’t know, just something other than BEGGING people for money.  It really rubbed me the wrong way.

This book was definitely the “get shit out of the way/ducks in a row” for the closing book.  It felt like, quick and maybe not particularly necessary.  Frankly, I’m thinking it should maybe have just been the first half of a larger book with book 3 as the second… we’ll see how that one goes.

Also, there wound up being a little too much “outside influence” aka whatever the plural of deux ex machina is for me to feel like Phaethon is an awesome self-made-man-organism-thing.

I liked the inclusion of his semi-wife-clone-thing, although some of the scenes with her felt rather jarring – instead of the traditional thoughts in italics, I *think* some of hers were in (), just inserted into other dialogue.  Nothing wrong with that convention, it’s just odd when it pops out in the last third of the book.  Hopefully she winds up in the 3rd book but, given the kind of lame-ass ending she got here, it seems like the intention is for her to float behind.

THREE STARS

Because it was good, and the series and the world are interesting, but it wasn’t good enough.  Or my hopes were too high, either way, it’s my rating.

vacation book review: The Golden Age

by: John C. Wright

Another book managed on the hectic pack-unpack-repack schedule that is our “vacation”.  This one I admit I read in a bit of a rush as I was quite curious where the hell it was going (SPOILER: Nowhere, it’s all setup for the next book – but this is not a bad thing ;)).

Oh, woops I basically just gave away the review with that aside there.   Let’s see.  It’s a crazy far future (~10k years from now) with some interesting restrictions: humanity has basically  just hung out in the solar system.  This is a little bizarre given the time frame, but makes sense within the context of the story.   Everyone is all super internetted up and babysat by super-duper sentient AIs.

The protagonist  is caught in a scheme of his own making, for the most part.    Memories are edited and hacked and futures and pasts are churned out at rather an alarming rate in this society.  All things are roughly permissible save harming others.   And leaving [SPOILER], which is where our protagonist is caught.  Kind of.

For the most part Wright did a good job at making the vast intellects of the AIs convincing and the stands of the various Peers (the super-uber-scooper-pooper rich) understandable.  It pulled me along at a solid pace and I was indeed engrossed.

Yet.  Something was missing.  Something I couldn’t quite put my fingers into.

Oh, and it kind of reminded me of a Shakespearean play.  Maybe a tragedy.  There was definitely a good vibe of ephemeral weirdness all up in there.  Looking forward to reading the closing volume.

THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS

Because it was good and interesting and creative but not quite better than sliced bread.