The book that made me like robots. Okay, androids. Okay, Ancient-Egyptian-inspired hyper-advanced noble sapient beings biotransfered into soulless, dysphoric, flesh-phobic metal skeletons. To put it simply.
I loved the aesthetics of the book. Burnished silver, green, and black. Silver metal bodies with glowing emerald cores and burning “eyes”. Actinic green flashes of firing pylons and voidcraft in the night sky. A sacred tomb invaded by orks as scarab constructs and far worse things scuttle and crawl out from the shadows. An obsidian-black desert necropolis thick with obelisks and alight with gauss lamps.
Most of all, I loved how alien the book was, how inhuman – yet gradually “humanised”, with emotional and empathetic touches. Communication in this book felt unique. The “necrons” have no facial expressions or inflections of voice, so instead they found more technological ways to express emotional nuance in their new bodies: through the intensity of their core-fluxes, their ocular flaring, discharge node patterns, vocal buzz-tones, actuator signals, and the glyph-signifiers (e.g. a glyph for earnestness or hostility – essentially emojis!) and interstitial codes appended to their communication relays.
This sci-fi story is my top choice because, out of all my 5-star reads, it presented something that felt truly different. I was eager to explore a non-human POV that wasn’t simply a human POV in a funny nose and green skin. I became fascinated by these reanimating yet steadily degrading (physically and psychologically) advanced constructs that used to be alien people, who are horrified by fl*sh and want to reclaim and defend their antediluvian dynasties and sacred tombs – and the legions of sarcophagi deep underground with inhabitants just waiting to awaken...
The gory splashes of unique body horror, well, that was just icing on the cake.
Peer into the into the bizarre culture and motivations of the Necrons in this great novel from Nate Crowley.
Exiled to the miserable world of Sedh, the disgraced necron lord Oltyx is consumed with bitterness. Once heir to the throne of a dynasty, he now commands nothing but a dwindling garrison of warriors, in a never-ending struggle against ork invaders. Oltyx can think of nothing but the prospect of vengeance against his betrayers, and the reclamation of his birthright. But the orks are merely the harbingers of a truly unstoppable force. Unless Oltyx acts to save his dynasty, revenge will…
A word more suitable than "epic" is "sprawling." This is a giant sprawl of a novel. Things don't even really seem to be happening until nearly 400 pages. And then they settle down again. And happen again. Each lull might be hundreds of pages long. (And there's a sequel, just as long).
This is not a plot-focused novel. It's very much a plot-unfocused novel. But what it does excel at, and I mean really excel at, is long-form worldbuilding. Or rather, universe-building. This universe feels lived-in, oddly grounded.
I got a real sense of the multitude of characters as real people living out their separate lives, on worlds familiar to ours yet with futuristic twists. We see their lives. We see whole stories of their lives before the plot of the novel even affects them. So when shit does hit the fan, it is all the more real and impactful for it.
In essence, this is a slow, drawn-out, sprawling, unfocused, meandering collage of a novel, a messy mosaic of stories.
It's also excellent. Pandora's Star exists as a definitive space opera: where bombastic, intergalactic sci-fi and cyberpunk meets twenty-season soap opera. Perhaps the best part of the book is when you finally get to experience the fascinatingly unique antagonists and learn of their rise to existential threat.
In AD 2329, humanity has colonised over four hundred planets, all of them interlinked by wormholes. With Earth at its centre, the Intersolar Commonwealth now occupies a sphere of space approximately four hundred light years across.When an astronomer on the outermost world of Gralmond, observes a star 2000 light years distant - and then a neighbouring one - vanish, it is time for the Commonwealth to discover what happened to them. For what if their disappearance indicates some kind of galactic conflict? Since a conventional wormhole cannot be used to reach these vanished stars, for the first time humans need…
Oh, Kennit. What a charming, gaslighting, charismatic, manipulative, handsome, repulsive, loveless, traumatised, psychopathic, tragic, villain.
The second book in this trilogy firmly suggested Kennit as one of my favourite literary characters, and possibly even favourite literary villain. This book cements it. I've never read a villain written so well.
The book is admittedly pretty slow to get going, and some early parts I found rather dull. But the book just keeps getting better and better as it goes. Few characters came out well in the aftermath of this book's most unpleasant scene – that was all the harder to read for its expert telling, but felt horribly realistic, even if it tore down multiple protagonists in doing so.
But the primary reason I love this trilogy is because of Kennit. Admittedly it helps that he’s also a pirate.
'Even better than the Farseer books. I didn't think that was possible' GEORGE RR MARTIN
The triumphant conclusion to the magnificent Liveship Traders series.
The dragon, Tintaglia, released from her wizardwood coffin, flies high over the Rain Wild River. Below her, Reyn and Selden have been left to drown, while Malta and the Satrap attempt to navigate the acid flow of the river in a decomposing boat.
Althea and Brashen are sailing the liveship Paragon into pirate waters in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the Vestrit family liveship, Vivacia, who was stolen by the pirate king, Kennit; but there is…
After a night of misadventure, a roguish street lad from Mexico Island wakes up aboard a legendary ship crewed by skeletons. In search of the father he’s never met — a great mound of treasure would be nice, too — India sails the fantastical Caribbean on the Ship of the Dead, exploring the colonial outpost of Kingston, revelling in the pirate island of Tortugal, and meeting colourful characters, friend and foe alike. But his adventures take a turn when he makes an enemy of the son of the Kingston governor, Lancer Main: the vengeful villain would much rather see India and his new friends swinging from the gallows...
INDIA MUERTE AND THE SHIP OF THE DEAD is the first book in a pirate fantasy adventure series, featuring the thrilling exploits of India Muerte in an exotic yet dangerous world.
