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lol oh boy here we go

I.e. tantalizing scifi worldbuilding mixed with solid characterization and "humans are the real monsters" psycho-political themes.

A little annoyed that I forgot the timeline enough I was visualizing Filip as, well, teenager from the show Filip, until the show hit me over the head with "he's 40 years older now, idiot".

3.5 stars. Enjoyable enough but had quite a few weaknesses even by Sullivan's own standards. But also I've read enough Sullivan by now that his schtick does wear thin in spots. Also suffers for being a "oh wow I haven't thought about xyz in like 800 years, lmao" type of story, except I'm coming to it having read all of Malazan over the last 3-4 years...yea. One of these earns its "characters are super old" stripes and the other very does not.

Kinda wanted to skip over this and just read Ministry of the Future, but figured I'd be boring/on-brand and go in publication order.

3.5 stars rounded down. See previous comment (should be easy to find on the bookwyrm instance itself?), only thing I'll add is that it ended somewhat abruptly.

Looking back, though, the entire work is almost more like a slice-of-life manga than a traditional scifi novel (again: emphasis is very much on mood and place, over plot or conflict) so it's not like it was all that jarring.

I'm glad I read it, but I'm also not likely to rush to seek out Tidhar's other works. (But if I ran across another one recommended in some context like a good friend gushing about it? Sure, I'd give him another shot.)

So far, it's...well it's got the mood down for sure, but like any sufficiently tech/digital focused (cyberpunky, I guess) scifi written by someone who pretty clearly isn't a computer programmer, some of the worldbuilding kinda grates. I'm sure this "wrap tech buzzwords in flowery/poetic language" stuff works on the normies, but.

The characters also mostly fall somewhat flat, though part of that may be because there are a good number of them.

I appreciate that the setting is not what I'm used to, and the characters are all various stripes of URM from an American viewpoint, which is welcome.

There is one worldbuilding quirk (language related) that feels extremely ripped off from another well known contemporary work, but I haven't exactly mapped out publication dates to see if that's more/less likely than simple convergence.