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[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]: The Left Hand of Darkness by …
I see why this is considered a classic of speculative fiction, and don't know why it took me decades to get around to reading it. The story and ideas clearly influenced entire generations of modern writers.
It's even better on a re-read years later.
[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969) …
[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969) …
It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry …
Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine.
Sure, there are the things you'd expect. …
Very much a piece of its time, this book is equal parts disheartening and uplifting. Sure, Gen X got screwed in the demographic lottery, and the Boomers seem intent on never letting go of the levers of power, but we have Nirvana. Written in 2007, Barack Obama is not yet elected, but Gordinier is very tired of the Bush era, and not terribly fond of looking back at the Clinton Administration either.
The optimism Gordinier views some of the Web 2.0 innovations with is downright adorable in retrospect. YouTube and Pandora and Meetup as forces of change and liberation? It's hard to recognize now. Gen Z is looking pretty energetic though.
Seven years have passed since the doors between the worlds were sealed. Seven years since …
While the book held a good story, it also held a lot of padding. Calling this "book 1" of a series is wildly misleading, as it is clearly a sequel to a previous series (the Shades of Magic). In an effort to relieve the reader of the need to finish the earlier books, The Fragile Threads of Power is overloaded with exposition in the form of multiple layers of flashbacks. Perhaps this would have worked better as Shades of Magic book 4, instead. At least then the reader would have assumed they'd need some familiarity with the previous work, and the author could have trimmed about half of the verbiage from this tome.
OK, that out of the way - it's an interesting concept, with the four parallel "worlds" with different magical strengths. Many of the characters are interesting, particularly Tes, but most of the named characters have some intriguing …
While the book held a good story, it also held a lot of padding. Calling this "book 1" of a series is wildly misleading, as it is clearly a sequel to a previous series (the Shades of Magic). In an effort to relieve the reader of the need to finish the earlier books, The Fragile Threads of Power is overloaded with exposition in the form of multiple layers of flashbacks. Perhaps this would have worked better as Shades of Magic book 4, instead. At least then the reader would have assumed they'd need some familiarity with the previous work, and the author could have trimmed about half of the verbiage from this tome.
OK, that out of the way - it's an interesting concept, with the four parallel "worlds" with different magical strengths. Many of the characters are interesting, particularly Tes, but most of the named characters have some intriguing depth to them. I kind of saw the big reveal coming long before it was written, but that didn't remove any of the interest. I still want to know why.
Seven years have passed since the doors between the worlds were sealed. Seven years since Kell, Lila and Holland stood …
If you never thought a book could make you quake with fear, prepare yourself for Red Dragon.
For you are …
If you're a massive tabletop gaming nerd, this may be a book you're interested in. It is a bit dry, and structured much more like a doctoral thesis than a pop culture book. But, it is exactly what it says on the tin - a brief history of hobby games and how they relate to race and gender.
This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have …
While you'd think a retelling of the myths of the Trojan War from the perspective of the mostly-marginalized women would be compelling, this book falls short. There aren't many new perspectives that we couldn't have written in our heads, and there's no big subversion of any of the various stories. We get Ulysses, Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, and all the rest, but it felt too much like all the previous iterations on the core tales. There are a few very good scenes, but not enough to overcome the sameness throughout.
