Ron Lubovich

A fun satire of well trodden Internet talking points…

Revisado: 04-30-25

Anyone expecting a science fiction novel needs to change their expectations or perhaps try a different novel by the same author. That’s not what this is.

What it is is a fun satire on Internet and conspiracy culture. The biggest failure of the book is the lack of subtlety in messages and using archetypes for characters. The author very much has their thesis, and they beat you with it repeatedly through monologues. I happen to agree with the author on pretty much all of their points about internet culture, so I didn’t find that particularly agonizing. But the message is really designed to be a knife into the heart of the terminally Online. And none of it is revolutionary. It’s very much a call to touch grass filtered through the personality archetypes of the Internet age. But these characters are very much stand-ins for people that you meet and interact with online every day. It’s not an amazing story either, but that’s not really the point of the book.

It’s a lighthearted read, it’s not going to change anybody’s lives. But it’s fun and worth a credit as long as you don’t find the messages too unpalatable.

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A solid sci-fi / political thriller with a few unrealistic aspects…

Revisado: 01-08-25

I enjoy a story about found alien artifacts, especially with some Cold War intrigue thrown in for good measure. Something akin to Greg Bear’s Eon or Crichton’s Sphere. But if you’re going to delve this deeply into political machinations set in a world with Obama and Bush as ancillary characters, getting the geopolitics right is more important (to me). This hawkish China, eager to make the kind of military blunders that the US routinely does is deeply out of character.

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A good entry in the series, but it was largely used to set up the next installment.

Revisado: 09-25-24

I can’t go into detail without spoiling the story, but Taylor manages to keep expanding the aperture of the story enough with each volume to show enjoyable growth and complexity. The only downside is that I felt like this book was a bit of log rolling setting up future installments.

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A far stronger sequel than I anticipated…

Revisado: 07-23-23

The writing in the first book was clunky, very basic. But this novel, while still imperfect and uneven, feels far more professional. The dialog is less wooden, the pacing is more even, but still will some unneeded digressions.

My biggest complaint would be the wildly unmatched timeframes that the book keeps moving between. At a certain point, you get what the author is doing, but that only happens after you realize what tributaries of narrative are more vital as worldbuilding than storytelling.

My second biggest complaint is that there are very few fleshed out characters. Anna’s choices and motivation never make sense, and the same goes with her father. You certainly understand where the obvious protagonists are coming from, though.

But the central mysteries of the silos’ origins feel forced and implausible. I don’t want to spoil it, but the amount of power attributed to a senior Senator is absurd. It’s implied there is a higher decider, but that never gets developed at all, so it leaves the reveals feeling arbitrary. It’s as though Howie had a great idea for a dystopian analogy for Plato’s cave and worked backwards to justify it, leaving some major plot holes in the process. Still a good book, no more implausible than most dystopias, but I feel like the story needed another editing pass before publishing.

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An archetypal alien world exploration story, but with anti climactic finale

Revisado: 05-23-23

Imagine a novel that calls out to great space frontier stories like those of A C Clarke, Greg Bear, but then imagine a climax that punts on the larger revelations in favor of human trauma. While that was often a hallmark of those stories, it is the centerpiece of this novel. So, while you watch a great mystery being built, the weight of human dysfunction collapses it before it goes anywhere. On one level, I admire and respect that from an author. But it also left me feeling very unsatisfied. Maybe an epilogue would have helped, something to give the trauma a larger context other than what it was. I’m trying to be vague, but I feel like I’ve given too much away already.

I will happily read the next Fractalverse novel, but I feel like this was an early draft that needed some expansion.

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A good yet very overly directed modern fantasy

Revisado: 10-22-22

I will start by saying that if you’re inclined to complain about things being “too woke” or other such tropes, this is not the book for you. This is a book for people in love with cities, particularly NYC. Some of the political predilections of the writer end up putting the story on some ideological rails, but I still could really enjoy the spirit of it even if it felt like ideas and viewpoints were driving the story in inorganic ways. I really love her Broken Earth trilogy, but this was not quite on par with that novel. Still a delight, though. But I share a lot of the author’s viewpoints, so they didn’t trigger an ideological gag reflex.

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Expository proclamations of the obvious (of Dune)

Revisado: 01-17-22

I tried to fall in love with this ending, albeit futilely. I came back three times since it’s release to hopefully find some nugget of joy in it. But I am relentlessly bombarded by chapter after chapter of exposition, arbitrary plot points, and messianic declarations that don’t feel earned in any way (“I am the ultimate Kwosatz Haderach” ends up being akin to a mantra by the end).

We are told repeatedly how much Omnius has changed since his earlier form 15k years earlier, but it behaves in exactly the same anthropomorphic, arbitrary, and motivationless manner as it does in the Butlerian Jihad novels. It’s an AI villain that monologues to other AI’s in human languages through speakers. There was an opportunity to make something terrifying, something topical. But instead, the authors created a monologuing villain who has no apparent motivation. It’s just a stand-in for a constant of evil. But for an entity of such purported intellect and power, it is rather stupid.

And the stupidity of major characters is a running theme. I don’t know if the authors just fail to respect their audience or whether they aren’t smart enough to be writing these characters, but every bit of subtext has to spelled out in expository dialog for a major character to understand what is happening. Things that should have been obvious to the reader get this treatment, only to be pronounced by a character to others who seem stunned by a revelation of obviousness.

And then there is the heavy use of literary cliches. It’s also a barrage of out-of-place idioms presented not as quirks from other memory to examined but instead as prose to the reader.

The Leto character serves no purpose and displays powers that make no sense in the context of the previous novels. I honestly believe most of the characters exist just for the authors to capitalize on nostalgia by resurrecting people from the earlier novels.

By the end, you’re presented with an arbitrary resolution via a literal deus ex machina (oracles and whatnot) and decisions that make no sense for the characters except that it arranges all the pieces in the way that the authors obviously decided upon. Arbitrary is a key word here for this book and its predecessor. A lot of major things happen but almost none of them properly connect to anything else. It’s just a series of plot points stumbled upon by a framing device (the old “man” and “woman” and their damned net). Many of the ideas brought out could have been interesting, had they been executed with some organic plotting and forethought. But for some reason, the authors bludgeoned their way through the story. And the facedancer “twist” at the end that fizzles out instantly just further is evidence of the kind of writing that takes every somewhat interesting idea they have and renders it pointless and nullified by yet another expository monologue. That’s the real theme of the book. Such a profound disappointment.

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One of the least “sober” assessments of the topic…

Revisado: 11-21-21

While I enjoyed the explorations of the history of the alien abduction phenomena, there were a few elements that really damaged my ability to enjoy this book or to take it too seriously.

First, the author doesn’t always stipulate the difference between FOIA revealed data and his speculations. As a result, an historical analysis will dovetail into hyperbolic terror over coming government microchips (for one example).

Another issue is that the author seems to have the emotional maturity of a teenager, treating the often sexual nature of perceived alien abductions with a snicker and a bad joke. Pretty much anytime the topic takes that turn, the author’s tone goes juvenile for the passage. And the narrator dives right into that tone as well.

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One of the more powerful science fiction novels I’ve read in years

Revisado: 10-17-21

This book is very human. Even as mythical fawns are used as metaphor, as post human variations scramble for survival on a long dead world, as the human world ends for millennia, it’s still a profoundly human book. This is not space opera, this is not a cyberthriller. This is an exploration of what people do to cope when the world they love is gone. People with the most power and people with the least. Usually literary minded science fiction finds its technological ideas suffering for a shift in focus toward a more personal experience. But this author manages to adeptly weave the two together. The only critique I’d make is a listing pattern that occasionally is employed to drive home a sense of loss. You’ll know it when you come to it. Otherwise, this is pretty close to my ideal form of science fiction.

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I’d read the Planetfall novel, but was not ready for this…

Revisado: 08-24-21

For a book almost entirely written in expository format, it carried an strong emotional impact. The first indicator or the bleakness came when the narrator details the destruction of the “toy” that saved his life when his father was too lost to care for him at 6 years of age.

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