A review by ohmage_resistance
The Sunforge by Sascha Stronach

adventurous challenging
So I didn't really have the best time with this book for a couple of reasons. Number one is that it's been a while since I read book one, so I had a bit of trouble remembering character names and roles. Number two is that this book did some very experimental stuff with timelines and surrealist mind trips and stuff like that. If book one was more like Perdido Street Station, this one was more like Archive Undying. I think I'm getting to the point where I'm realizing that books that are experimental for experimental's sake don't really work for me. Experimental because it works with the themes really well, I enjoy that (shoutout to The Spear Cuts Through Water), but books that are hard to follow just because, yeah, at a certain point the work to reward ration just isn't there (I should clarify that there are some themes here about colonization and oppression, they just aren't really meaningfully benefited by the way the book is written). There was even a nuclear reactor and I couldn't even tell what was going on with that (to the point where it was unclear whether it was a fusion or fission reactor (fission makes a lot more sense (because fusion reactors don't work like that), but they would occasionally talk about it like a fusion reactor plus that makes more sense for the title, IDK, and sometimes it was treated more like a bomb instead)), and I know more about nuclear reactors than your average person. Number three is that the audiobook is the wrong choice for this one. I find keeping track of characters and timelines harder in audiobooks, so I think if I were to try this book again, I would definitely try to read it with my eyes. But I honestly would recommend this for anyone, if only so that you can avoid listening to the narrator say "Then she drowned" at least a hundred times (another experimental writing choice that didn't really work.) Overall, I thought about maybe retrying this one with an ebook, but honestly, I don't think I enjoyed it enough to put in even more work to better understand the plot. Book 1 was still kind of trippy but to a way lower extent and was much better.

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