I generally like Max Gladstone’s writing, and I like this book’s message of community\/collaboration, but space opera as a genre is not particularly my thing. The way the characters escape from one dangerous situation straight into another one sometimes leaves me feeling bored; I don’t particularly care about enormous spaceships and epic battles and deadly robots, which this book has in abundance; it also doesn’t help that a major plot point is way too obvious, way too early. That said, this was a pretty fun vacation read: it starts with Vivian Liao, a tech genius who thinks she’s about to be in trouble with a government that isn’t above torturing its enemies, throwing herself a birthday party only to disappear from it. She heads to a server farm in Boston, as planned, and starts running a script that she thinks will self-optimize to solve all sorts of problems. At that point, things go wrong, and Viv finds herself in a different story entirely, one where she has to defeat the Empress of the book’s title, working together with a cast of characters including a monk, a long-imprisoned pirate queen, a woman born to be a pilot, and a matter-devouring shape-shifting monster (who might be my favorite character of all) to save the galaxy from the Empress’s tyranny. Like I said: not particularly my thing, but I didn’t consider abandoning it, and I like the book’s sense of humor and heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I generally like Max Gladstone’s writing, and I like this book’s message of community\/collaboration, but space opera as a genre is not particularly my thing. The way the characters escape from one dangerous situation straight into another one sometimes leaves me feeling bored; I don’t particularly care about enormous spaceships and epic battles and deadly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}