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landofnowhereShades of Grey, Jasper Fforde. Reread, as good and well-structured as I remembered. On my last reread the ending came across as particularly bleak as the protagonist finds himself forced into marriage to a woman with no respect for others' boundaries who has already coerced him into sex once, not to mention that he's been forced to send two of his friends to apparent death in order not to blow his cover -- however knowing that there was a sequel set immediately after this book helped mitigate this.
Red Side Story, Jasper Fforde. For a sequel published 15 years after the original, the transition is pretty smooth (not perfect, but some of that is just the obligation to squeeze some infodumps in for people who haven't just read book 1). The ending to this book felt a lot more hopeful than the first one, even though it has a much higher body count. I enjoyed the dramatic car race scene. Would have liked to see more Lucy Ochre (who just wants to do science, and I would watch the Lucy Ochre Does Science show, but that is not what this book is getting into). Its vision of the future had more in common with Terra Ignota than I expected, though resemblances are mostly superficial. Curious to see where the next book goes, hopefully it won't take another 15 years, though the ending of this book also makes a natural stopping point.
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. I really liked this one. A Sherlock Holmes-style murder mystery, with the high-quality worldbuilding I've come to expect from Bennett. Actually this kind of does the thing that The Nine Tailors does, where there's the murder mystery plot, and then there's the highly atmospheric setting with failing infrastructure and natural disasters, and they just coexist without really interacting. Except in this case the natural disasters are leviathan attacks. Also has some good meditation on empire/government. I thought the neurodiversity in this was handled very well, in a setting the worldbuilding allows people to be modified in various ways to gain superpowers, but also the detective and her sidekick are recognizably autistic and dyslexic (respectively).
Red Side Story, Jasper Fforde. For a sequel published 15 years after the original, the transition is pretty smooth (not perfect, but some of that is just the obligation to squeeze some infodumps in for people who haven't just read book 1). The ending to this book felt a lot more hopeful than the first one, even though it has a much higher body count. I enjoyed the dramatic car race scene. Would have liked to see more Lucy Ochre (who just wants to do science, and I would watch the Lucy Ochre Does Science show, but that is not what this book is getting into). Its vision of the future had more in common with Terra Ignota than I expected, though resemblances are mostly superficial. Curious to see where the next book goes, hopefully it won't take another 15 years, though the ending of this book also makes a natural stopping point.
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. I really liked this one. A Sherlock Holmes-style murder mystery, with the high-quality worldbuilding I've come to expect from Bennett. Actually this kind of does the thing that The Nine Tailors does, where there's the murder mystery plot, and then there's the highly atmospheric setting with failing infrastructure and natural disasters, and they just coexist without really interacting. Except in this case the natural disasters are leviathan attacks. Also has some good meditation on empire/government. I thought the neurodiversity in this was handled very well, in a setting the worldbuilding allows people to be modified in various ways to gain superpowers, but also the detective and her sidekick are recognizably autistic and dyslexic (respectively).