A review by crimsoncor
Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer

3.0

This book took me almost 5 months to finish. I had to take breaks and read other stuff, just to remind myself that I'm actually capable of finishing a book. And it isn't that I didn't like the book. It was just so long and so dense. Too long and too dense. Almost twice the length of anything else in the series and really felt like it was an attempt to cram 2 or 3 books worth of stuff into a single volume. There were parts that were magnificent.

Spoiler

The attack on the Utopian space settlements was a torrent of shock and awe that brought to mind some of the most shocking epic destruction sequences in written scifi (the end of Donaldson's Gap Series and the ending of Stross's Merchant Princes). And then it all gets hand-waved away with some Deus ex machina. I mean, it is a book about gods (kinda), but still felt like someone let all the air out of the balloon.

And I think that has to be one of my main criticisms, which is that this book is never afraid to let its ideas get in the way of the story.

Spoiler

Something else which bugged me, oddly enough in a book full of mystical shit, was the continued reincarnation of Mycroft. I know, like the 20th least weird thing in a book where Achilles from the Illium returns, but it just really bugged me.

. At the end of it, I still don't think I would really recommend this series to someone, but I didn't dislike it. But it feels like if you want a weird future scifi series about building a better society replete with Greek gods and a war over Mars, you'd go with the the Dan Simmons' Illium. And if you wanted a weird but cool model of future political and social then Malka Older's Centenal Cycle or maybe The Actual Star by Monica Byrne. I don't know. This entire series feels like a massive missed opportunity, but I'm still glad it exists. And that I've finally finished reading it.