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What a fun revisit. You can tell it's a first novel, Gibson is a little too fond of his own prose, but the way he welds noir to sci-fi still reeks of back alleys, poorly ventilated squats and overheating processors. Sure the plot is a mess, sure the characters are flat, sure much of the tech is adorably outdated (though the whole AI plot feels pretty on point these days) but the whole thing is just so incredibly stylish that it makes you want to love it.

Well, this novel slowly snuck up on me, slowly but unstoppably. The first 70 pages or so seem fairly straight-forward future dystopia - not with all questions answered, but still. And then we get into the meat of the plot and it becomes something else entirely. Sure, you can (and possibly should) find all sorts of common vibrations here; of how we don't all live in the same (perceived) world, of how the constant hunt for the future ravages the present, of how we're always prepared to do horrible things rather than reshape our reality. But honestly, the one thing that kind of bugs me about the book is that we get it spelled out in the end. (If you believe it. It's all relative.) It's in the sheer panicked movement forward that the novel lives. Like a shark. On land. Without fins. It's in the impossibility of knowing what someone else sees. In the vertigo of passing through.

Train kept a-rolling all night long
Train kept a-rolling all night long
With a heave, and a ho
But I just couldn't let her go

3.5, or thereabouts. There's a lot I really love about this; the setup, the main theme, the idea of language magic, the way it sets up the dreaming spires and magic school only to cheerfully tear it apart, the clip it starts moving at once it gets going...

But damn, Kuang doesn't half run her theme into the ground, does she? Of 545 pages I'm pretty sure fully half are characters discussing colonialism, and I love that they do, and I love that it's the central conflict, but there is such a thing as overegging. Especially since it starts sounding a little too much like a 21st century textbook rather than an 1830s period piece.

Also, for a story with so little changed - or maybe exactly because it's a story with so little changed - I kind of wish she'd explored that one change more. Give me more etymolagic, use it for more than just spells; if you want to do The Secret History, then do The Secret History.

Still, yeah. It manages that trick where it makes me want to overlook its flaws, and that goes a long way. It's memorable, just not only for the best reasons.

Mixed bag. Fry's tone is... Fry. He's funny, he's just snobbishly ironic enough for it to land when there's a character (Prometheus, usually) he really does care about, he's well-read but not sycophantic, he can spin a yarn.

But when 90% of the yarns start to sound very similar - and Fry acknowledges it - it gets old. "A [person] was unfathomably beautiful, and then Zeus got horny." So much of the power in myth is how they're told, not just the summary of them. Mythos becomes a useful one-volume summary of the whole mess, there's a bunch of laughs (or at least grins), but in the end I end up skimming a few too many bits for the highlights.

Now this was just endlessly entertaining. Alternate history liberally sprinkled with jazz, linguistics, power structures, hardboiled detectives and some really neat worldbuilding, that's just a great way to start the reading year. Is it THE most indepth, hard-hitting look at race and class relations in the (OK, a) US? No. But it uses its narrative and the world it creates to create a utopia of what might be without making it all too simple. I'm sure you can ask whether a white Brit is the one who should be telling this story, but it IS a world that never got to be, so nobody's lived in it; just the ones who read this story. And it's a story that keeps finding new stones to turn over. Cue up a good prohibition-era playlist, pour yourself a gimlet and dig in.

Bra och snabbläst översikt över olika marknadsföringsmöjligheter för bibliotek. Gillar speciellt att den lyfter fram just frågan om att tänka strategiskt, inte bara då och då göra inlägg på sociala medier när man har tid.

Samtidigt hade jag också velat ha fler konkreta exempel, både på kanaler och innehåll; just frågan om VAD man skriver är mest begränsat till kapitlet om "Humor i sociala medier", det hade varit bra med lite mer frågor just runt vad som får ett inlägg att stå ut, hur kommunikation i klarspråk går till, etc. Det är fortfarande alldeles för mycket kommunikation från offentliga verksamheter som nöjer sig med att Göra Information Tillgänglig ("Det finns på vår hemsida om du klickar runt lite grann").

Closer to 3.5 than to 4.0, but in the end it wins me over. There's a lot of worldbuilding, tech and post-human philosophy here that's admirable but not necessarily thrilling (If we can create beings with human-equivalent intelligence, what does it say about us if we limit the intelligence we put in our creations?), especially since it takes place over literally millennia with some huge time skips and has characters that are nigh-immortal. But eventually, it builds to a finale that's both effective and thoughtworthy in its refusal to bow to pessimism.

Every genre gets a cosy version, so why not D&D-style fantasy too? Somewhere out there, someone must be writing cosy splatterpunk.

I really enjoyed this novel more than the three stars indicate. It's a nice idea. It's a nice mix of characters. It's nicely told. Baldree neither has nor tries for the wit of Pratchett, or the politicking of Martin, or the hard questions of LeGuin, or... (can you tell I'm not a deep-cut fantasy reader?) It's all almost frustratingly nice. It's sweet and fluffy like a good cinnamon roll. It goes down perfectly with a cup of good coffee. That makes it a very good holiday read, even if I'd probably get sick of it if I decided to read a dozen more like it.