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christensen5 's review for:

The Hair Carpet Weavers by Andreas Eschbach
4.0

4-

This was very unusual, and has stuck in my mind since completing it months ago now. If there is a take-home message to the novel, it's something along the lines of: "Humans are powerful, highly suggestible, malleable machines, capable of just about anything, sublime or terrible, for just about any motive, beneficent or evil...and most of us probably don't have any idea which category we and our actions fit in to." I found the story really quite captivating.

This is not the most technically-minded sci-fi but rather a great execution of a strange and vast future, peopled with varied, interesting and genuine characters. The narrative is interestingly structured into distinct but interlinked little episodes, and the exposition of the Empire and its history is well paced, yielding little at first but teasing and suggesting at an accelerating pace. The mystery of the hair carpets themselves was strange and intricate, fully captured my attention, and was satisfyingly
Spoilerif horrifyingly!<\spoiler>, resolved in the end. An engaging, thought-provoking read all in all.