Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

blog posts about scifi

Book review - Tiamat’s wrath - book nine of the expanse series.

This book review is really only for people who have been reading all of the expanse book series. If you have not then there are some spoilers in here. I finished this over my summer holiday, and it was a ton of fun. I noted that In the first few books of the series when the action was contained within the solar system a lot of book time was taken up describing the time it took to travel around the solar system, and the intricacies if the orbital mechanics that went into that. ... (more)

The three body problem.

I’ve just zipped through this book in what feels like about a week, but was probably a bit longer. I didn’t like it. The book sets up engagement with a computer game as a key plot driver, along with specific behaviours of an alien civilisation. Both of these are central to the driver of the book and in both cases I wasn’t able to believe what was happening. They lacked internal consistency and plausibility, in particular the plot device of unpacking a proton and accessing higher dimensional spaces. ... (more)