emperor: (Default)
Another of the Hugo novel nominees this year. This is set on a tidally-locked planet, much of which is freezing cold and dark or blisteringly hot. The city we start in has rigidly imposed circadian patterns - you must be inside by curfew, and it's a crime to sleep when you should be awake; later we visit other places with different ideas of how to approach life in this hostile environment.

This is another book that takes a while to get going, and I found the ends of some of the sections a bit abrupt to be properly satisfying; to some extent I think this is because Anders is more interested in the characters and their ideas than the plot per se. But it gets much more gripping towards the end (which has a slightly unsatisfactory maybe there will be a sequel quality to it). And there's a lot here about different ways to run a society, power, trust, and so on. Plus a number of twists that I didn't see coming :)

Recommended - to my mind this is better than Middlegame, for example.

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