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Notes -
I rather enjoyed Theft of Fire. Premise is that a rich gene-modded anime girl kidnaps tough Spacer Pirate in his own ship for a secret quest. An enormous amount of sexual tension ensues.
Pros:
Engaging from the get-go. I drop a lot of writing early on, this novel caught me and kept me. That's the most important thing a book can do, IMO.
Author dunks on leftists on twitter but they're not really screeds so much as long well-written, impassioned pleas and thoughtful statements that sound that they could belong here, albeit toned down from twitter norms of hostility. The ultimate political tone of the novel is right-libertarian: holding to one's promises, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The setting is right-libertarian, there are no state govts in space and Earth is an irrelevant basketcase. No strawmen ideologies amongst the main cast though, characters are treated with dignity and the setting has the flaws you'd expect of ancapistan. I think the author only actually got noticed because he was dunking on leftists on twitter, some of the people I followed retweeted him and that's how I found out about the novel.
Thematically clear and interesting, it had a variant on the Frog and the Scorpion that made me think 'this guy is somewhat thoughtful'.
Cons:
It's not what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi, taking a few too many liberties with stealth-in-space, though the no-stealth-in-space principle isn't totally violated. AI is of the pre-GPT tropes of 'artificial stupidity' or 'completely human-personality tech-genius in a box' kind, which I found slightly irksome. I hope this trope is finally going to die soon. There's some implausible evasive flying later on.
Some of the combat writing became a bit hard to follow but this was rather minor.
Ending somewhat weaker than the middle. When I was half-way through I wished 'why can't this book be longer' and I still want to see a sequel, I just don't want it quite so desperately.
There's also David Chalmers' Reality + which I found to be midwit regurgitation of better minds (Bostrom and so on) + more unnecessary pop culture references than you could poke a stick at.
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