skybridge

daisywolf.bsky.social · @daisywolf.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Recursion 6/10

I'm a slow reader, but I plowed through this in a couple of nights - fast by my standards. Normally that would be a solid endorsement for a book - "So good, I just couldn't stop reading it!!" - and for the first 2/3, that's maybe true. I blasted through final 1/3, mostly because I had enough and just wanted it to be over.
The premise is interesting, the pacing is good, and its just easy reading overall. I guess the thing about this book is that there is no balance. This is a sci-fi thriller, but it's peppered with melodrama, which would be totally okay if it weren't so over the top. The number of "tears running down cheeks", or being "wiped off" off cheeks, rivals the the body count in Rambo 4. The emphasis on Helena's nobleness gets super grating. She initially nobly dedicates her life to alleviating her mother's suffering from Alzheimer's. Fine, great, heartwarming stuff. Then the nobleness gets dialed up to 11, by living through 200+ years of lifetimes dedicated entirely to the destruction of the chair and erasing its effects, with constant moaning about the burden of having created a doomsday device - with noble intentions, of course - in the first place. Did I mention that in addition to being a genius, she's also very attractive? Oh, and her only flaws are apparently that she's a little bit untidy and has singular focus, ie: she works too hard/is too noble.
Lack of balance seems to be a sub-theme in this story, established early on during a conversation between Helena and Slade, which can be summarized as "balance is for losers". Unsurprisingly, overwork is pretty heavily fetishized in this story. Remember kids, nothing of value comes from having varied interests and wanting to do other stuff, other than work for every available second that you're awake.
Opinions on workaholism aside, the frustrating thing here is how close this book comes to being amazing. A lot of effort gets spent on describing the concepts behind the memory chair, which lends the story a little bit of believability, but again this gets wrecked by the author's inability to balance between the desire to blow readers away, and keeping things somewhat believable and credible. As a reader, it's obviously great to have your mind blown, but its like eating lobster - once in a while its a lovely treat, but if you ate lobster for dinner every night, you be sick of it after a week. The last 1/3 of this book is basically lobster for breakfast, lunch, and supper. It's just too damn much..

#book

Published 2026-09-20 17:37 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere