RaveSF ReviewsMartin\'s writing, as expected, never meets anything less than the highest standards of literary craft, with many individual chapters good enough to function on their own as award-worthy short stories. Beyond its prose, what I noted about Dance is that it\'s nothing less than a model of editing ... Martin\'s work here, together with his editors, is an achievement. The dramatic payoffs may seem a long time coming in Dance. But the point is that they do come ... if you\'re wondering if Martin has any shockers in store this time...he does.
Cixin Liu
PositiveSF ReviewsGiven a graceful and accessible translation by multi-award winning author Ken Liu for its 2014 US release, [The Three Body Problem is] a unique tale of first contact and alien invasion set against the tumultuous political history of Liu’s homeland and the most mind-bending speculative frontiers of theoretical physics. It’s far from perfect, but in its best moments is so unlike anything hard SF has thrown at us before that no dedicated reader of the genre should overlook it ... But the book is uneven. The majority of its characters are either weakly developed or not especially developed at all ... All of the book’s in-game scenes are utterly dazzling spectacle, and if the Chinese movie studios that are planning to film this entire trilogy actually have the resources to pull them off, I’ll be stunned. But Wang himself, as a viewpoint character, is quite simply boring ... Also — and I understand this may be an unavoidable artifact of the translation — almost all the characters speak in rather stilted and much-too-mannered dialogue. It’s also the case that for every brain-boggling and reality-bending setpiece, there is exposition infodumping mountains of level-9000 science on us The Three-Body Problem aims high and then higher, which ought to be the goal of science fiction generally. While its breathtaking vision is occasionally tripped up by shortcomings in storytelling, it remains a true achievement by an important writer on the global SF scene.
N. K. Jemisin
RaveSF ReviewsJemisin\'s enthusiastically praised first novel is, at heart, a sumptuously mounted soap opera. It\'s simply packed to the rafters with secrets and lies, skullduggery and betrayal, lust and anguish, all within the context of the most staggeringly dysfunctional family dynasty one can imagine ... She has a truly impressive skill for taking a plot so labyrinthine it would make a minotaur dizzy and guiding us through it with satisfying clarity. She knows how to time each of her story\'s juiciest reveals for best emotional impact ... Where much epic fantasy is about spectacle, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms prefers intimacy. With Yeine as the first-person viewpoint character throughout, we see the drama unfold through all its head-spinning intricacies entirely through her eyes ... There are precious few books in the fantasy genre that can be said to be as refreshingly original in their approach as this one .... Haunting and heartfelt.
Philip Pullman
RaveSFReviews.comA bravura trilogy deserves a bravura finish. The Amber Spyglass concludes Philip Pullman's challenging and polarizing His Dark Materials by delivering just such showmanship for most of its length, before finally dailing down the spectacle at the very end and becoming an intensely personal story of love and loss and sacrifice for the greater good on the part of its adolescent heroes... There are scenes here that are breathtakingly heroic and heartbreaking at the same time, at all times avoiding cheap sentiment or mawkishness ...a powerful tale with much to say, and one that will linger in the mind and heart as all great stories do ... most overt in its religious critique ...whole trilogy ends on a triumphant note. It is perhaps inevitable, and too bad, that readers too sensitive to criticisms of the Christian faith will not be in a position to admire the book for its storytelling strengths and, yes, its humanist message.
