Mike Wilson

Trigger warning: Child soldiers

Revisado: 03-10-25

Most of the story revolves around a group of children being harshly indoctrinated into a military force. It's an unpleasant subject that is treated far too lightly by the author.

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AI == no engagement

Revisado: 02-18-25

It's clear that this book was an attempt by the author to re-create the success of his (genuinely great for the first few books) Good Intentions series. In those books, archetypes for good an evil get involved with a young man, as the driver for a modern, harem romance with a nice guy hero.

Unfortunately, this book is unable to match that success (despite the awesome-as-always Tess Irondale's narration) for one simple reason: By choosing an AI driven automaton as the female lead, any possibility of engagement is impossible. "She" almost by definition must be either acting out trained characteristics designed to convince a male to develop an emotional attachment (a la the "Ex Machina" movie) or, even worse, is simply mimicking approximations of emotion based on a generative algorithm with feedback. On any given interaction, this could lead to anything from an "uncanny" response to a decision to kill the MC, but regardless, you certainly can't believe anything "she" says.

Separate from that, the sci-fi universe doesn't work as well as a backdrop for the action since it removes the contrast between the normalcy of the setting and the unnatural aspects of the relationships.

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A mess

Revisado: 08-17-24

The world building is complex, unexplainable, and filled with contradictions. The main character(s?) has no moral compass, almost no ability to reason logically, and barely any agency. The book spends way too much time investing in the main character's back story, then throws that away for an entirely new one, leaving you wondering why you should care about the MC at all. Definitely not worth investing nearly 60 hours of your life.

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Brilliant series ruined by grimdark.

Revisado: 08-01-24

This series has always tried to walk a line between situations with world ending levels of danger/challenge, and light hearted, coming of age slice of life story telling. In part this was supported by an MC with a boundlessly positive world view (and a bit too much deference to the women in his life).

It seems that the author has lost sight of this balance. The book starts with the MC's powers destroyed, and the knowledge that they are dying and will be dead in a few months. It only goes downhill from there. His support is lost. His reputation is destroyed. His body is damaged in ways that are visible and incurable (even with magic). The situation is so dire, that no rational person could assume there would be a positive outcome.

At the half-way mark, it appears that the possibilities for the end of the story are either the MC will lose, ending the series with the moral that no matter how powerful, heroes die. Or the ending will be so pyrrhic that it will make Frodo leaving for the gray havens, seem humorous.

I get the feeling that the author intended this to be the grand finale for the series but in an effort to go out with a bang, they have ruined the thing that made the series great: The MC could keep their positive world view because they *experienced* some of that positivity at least some of the time. In this book, it's soul crushing sadness all the way down. The MC's positivity is absolutely jarring in the face of the situations they are placed in, to the point that it just comes across as self-deception.

I am seriously considering just stopping now.

Update: I fought through to the end, and although things do turn around for the MC, the level of Deus ex machina it took to get them there, was beyond ludicrous.

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Inconsistencies and broken system are hard to like

Revisado: 07-10-24

Clearly this book was not intended to be high art, but even as a simple adventure novel there were too many places where the author lost the thread of the story -- important plot points were sometimes irrelevant a few pages later. In addition, the MC's ability to use their "system" to see aspects of the other characters capabilities was wildly inconsistent. Why would someone with just 25% in their love meter suddenly decide to have sex with the MC in a public place? For that matter, why did the MC build a "bot" to track their stats, when the system could display them at a moments notice?

The other characters in the story were shallow to the point of being templates. The narration was ok, but the female voices were uninspiring. Overall, the book was a potentially interesting story, let down by lack of effort.

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It's a struggle...

Revisado: 06-03-24

... to get through at least the first third of the book. The rather horrific childhood the MC lives through, combined with the resulting sociopathic personality, leads to *very* unreliable narration. Four hours in there is no evidence that the MC will ever be anything but an ultra-violent drone for the mega-corporation they work for. As a dark mirror to personify the corruption of the society it is a reasonable literary technique. It is not however, a fun read. Setting this one aside until some time when I'm feeling too upbeat.

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Painfully boring.

Revisado: 05-05-24

The book is billed as a "weak-to-strong MC story", but it would be better described as a "colourless-to-dull MC story".

It begins with the MC working as a forester who has an extremely unhealthy attachment to their axe. To make the depth of the obsession clear, despite the axe being a standard, non-sentient piece of hardware, the MC's internal dialog includes *dozens* of references to it as their "best friend" and it's clear from the context that this is not a euphemism -- they even make a point of sleeping with the axe at one point. It's possible that the author's intent was to demonstrate some atypical mentality by all this, but truly it succeeds only in making the MC unlikeable.

The story arc follows the MC through a series of unhappy accidents driven by their inability to make basic cause/effect decisions about obvious situations, leading to them unexpectedly entering a magic academy brimming with all of the standard tropes. This section of the book is split between the MC making more poor decisions leading to them being physically injured, and stultifyingly long descriptions of the universe's magic system that at times felt like chapters from a university text book.

It's possible that something interesting happens in the last 5 hours of the book, but given the experience to that point, the prospect seemed unlikely. DNF.

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Boring?

Revisado: 01-09-24

How can a book with so much sex and violence be sooo boring? Unflattering and stupid MCs, tedious descriptions of historical events that are largely irrelevant other than as padding, painfully bad decision making. Ugh. At less than 8 hours, definitely not worth the credit.

Not the narrator's best work, but she did well with the material she was given.

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Boring!

Revisado: 11-15-23

The MC in this story is a scientist, who actively demonstrates his lack of real world understanding by making many poor decisions while lamenting the situation he is in. He is *not* a hero. If you're looking for a post-apocalyptic LitRPG with characters that are fallible humans, who fail as often as not, have at it. Be warned though, after six hours of listening, the good guys still have no idea what's going on, and are still struggling to build a base of operations. The book is filled with minutia that isn't relevant to the story, and ultimately this leads to a confused and, in truth, boring experience.

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Unexpectedly fun.

Revisado: 10-19-23

A standard timeloop story typically proceeds along a well defined path, with the MC mostly attempting to glean some secret that allows them to finish the story/exit the loop. This book is somewhat different in that, although the MC has a *statistical* understanding of what's happening (based on the 99 previous runs), the specifics of the scenario change almost immediately -- not least of which because the main enemy is actively working to make things hard for the MC. This focus shift seems to have elevated the story above the average.

Of course, the MC is still drastically overpowered because they use the foreknowledge they have to acquire powerful abilities/items early in the story, but that's to be expected.

Overall, a light but enjoyable listen.

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