Walking on the Moon

I really liked this book. It took an interesting hook – Orc in a high fantasy/D&D/WoW world wants to retire from adventuring and open a coffee shop – and delivers the goods.

I realize how much craft it takes to make that happen. Travis Baldree has to put enough of the world on the table to make the idea make sense without distracting the reader from the story of this character doing it. And he knows that a reader picking up this book is going to be able to swallow “gnomish espresso machine” long enough to let the world form up around them and make it all make sense.

And then as that world forms he brings in a set of likeable characters along with some not very likeable ones. None too deep, none too shallow. And in parallel with that Baldree lays out his perfect coffee shop. I mean, I assume he does. Why create a coffee shop in a fantasy setting if it’s not your fantasy coffee shop? (He’s a little too heavy on pastry love and a little light on actual coffee.)

There’s a plot, of course. Bad folks want to advance their agendas and our characters have growing to do. It’s all just enough to give a point to hanging out in this emerging coffee shop and these characters. And I had fun doing that.

Recommended.

Fourteen Days is a collaborative novel set in New York City in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a fair amount of room in the “collaborative novel” category. This one is more Canterbury Tales than “write your buddy into a corner,” but it’s not strictly a framing sequence and a bunch of short stories either.

It is in the genre of a bunch of strangers thrown together who start telling tales to pass the time. But Atwood and Preston do a good job of building a sound structure around it. They don’t hide that the novel is composed of short stories and connective tissue. The structure emerges in how one story seems to set another off or how the characters notice and react to the themes of the stories.

The ambience starts as something like telling stories around a campfire but builds to being more confessional. All the characters are reflected in their stories, but not all are defined by them. Everyone is more fleshed out. Most of the characters who do narrate a foundational event in their lives already seem like the kind of person shaped by the event before they tell the story.

It is a novel. There’s a narrative, the characters grow, and the plot is diverting. But I did feel like it was less focused than a work by a single author or small writing team. I am amazed that it is the coherent work that it is. More than 30 authors collaborated on this. If you told me that you could make a book this good composed of significant passages by Erica Jong and R. L. Stine plus 30 others whose works are equally unlike one another, I would have been very skeptical. A feat by all involved.

Recommended.

Death’s End brings the history that runs through The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest to a close. I’ve read enough SF to say “to a close” is tentative at best, but Cixin does project some finality here. That said, the book does begin by retconning a character into the timeline established in The Dark Forest, so I wouldn’t go etching anything into stone, effective as that might be.

The retcon crack was probably unnecessarily snarky. Cixin definitely wrote these books to explore larger themes and I think his universe building only enhances that. And like his other books, I think he’s playing with more than one theme here.

Death’s End spends time talking about fairy tales and the messages we convey to one another. There are nice ideas here about how much the context of the teller matters and how timeless the values are that are passed along. He also raises some interesting questions about when children’s values are appropriate for adults.

Even without the title, the book doesn’t hide that it wants to talk about death and how people face it. Earlier books were more focused on how a culture faces possible extinction, but Death’s End turns more to the personal. The characters always are making decisions with implications far beyond themselves, but Cixin’s clear that those choices are always made by individuals with individual values.

I can see a reading where The Dark Forest and Death’s End are set up as masculine and feminine world views. I think there’s definitely text to support that, but I don’t agree with binding the viewpoints to genders. I’m sure people will take other sides of that argument.

All of this is wrapped up in a Space Opera that is written well and paced to keep the pages turning.

Overall I find the trilogy worth reading and interesting. I’m still thinking about it and arguing with myself about it.

Strongly Recommended.