This was another Babbler from last year. More military sci if. It ended very abruptly, leading no doubt to the sequel, which I will no doubt read. It also left me with some questions, like is the narrator reliable? is his apparently excessive consumption of whiskey a gun on the wall, or just part of the personality? 
It was an okay read. I found the narrator somewhat self-satisfied, and not my favorite. But i will keep reading the series because i hate not knowing what happens next. 
I would take great pleasure in having a discussion with anyone who has read this, or any of the other Babblers from last year, which I am now belatedly working my way through. 

edited to add, I have just started the sequel, called Spaceside, and it seems it is moving on from the Planetside storyline, which I find a bit annoying as I thought there was a lot left unresolved in Planetside,  not least of which is a fundamental question about the point of the whole thing. In this universe, capitalism mandates that humans invade all habitable planets, regardless of whether there are intelligent species present, and take whatever they want, in service of the idea that humanity deserves it, I guess. The narrator seems to agree with this, in an unquestioning kind of way.  It is not a perspective I share, so I am asking myself why I am reading the sequel. 

Edited again to say that in fact the sequel does follow on the story line, which I guess is less annoying than if all those loose ends had been left hanging. Also, the author, or the narrator, has a strange fixation on women's hairstyles - he is always remarking on how one woman or another has her hair in a "tight bun."  Seems a bit odd to me  I mean, if tight buns are so common that many of the women he encounters wear their hair that way, why comment on it? Or is it a strange coincidence that all these women wear their hair in tight buns? Or is there any such thing as coincidence? Maybe it is a secret cabal whose recognition signal is a tight bun. 
Oh well.  This is probably not important. 


 

Last edited by Kokipy (2/05/2021 3:50 pm)