Reviews and Comments

This third entry in Tepper's Arbai sort-of-trilogy is the weakest of the three, but this is possibly a reflection of the incredibly high bar she set for herself with Grass.

Sideshow returns to may of the themes of the previous two books, but it all feels a bit more didactic, with less engaging characters and a weaker, more plodding, story.

If you have read Grass and Raising the Stones, then Sideshow wraps things up reasonably well. Otherwise... Tepper has written better books than this.

The premise of this novel is comically brilliant and the early chapters have several laugh-out-loud moments.



It all slows down a bit once the plot gets going, but The Kaiju Preservation Society remains a fun romp throughout.

While there are plenty of moments of comic brilliance, Most Harmless does have a bit of a disjointed feel overall.

I did feel, with Life, the Universe and Everything, that the series was starting to lose it's way somewhat. With this book, though, Adams gets solidly back on track.



It's very different to what has gone before, and this is very much to the book's advantage. Arthur is more of a character this time around and there's visible plot.



So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is still very much a Hitchhiker's book, but it also demonstrates the value in a series taking the occasional left turn.

I do have a strong sense of the series starting to lose its way with this novel. It certainly has its moments, but really doesn't come close to the standard set by the first two books.

This is a lot funnier than I remembered and, if anything, even better that The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.



It feels that Adams really hit his stride with this book and the absurdities that make his writing such a joy to read feel a lot more pointed and, consequently, a great deal more effective.

Given the age of this story, it's surprising just how relevant E.M. Forster's dystopia remains.

42 years later and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is still as absurdly funny, insanely perceptive and shockingly relevant as ever.



I still love the babel fish!

Surprisingly slow to get started but once it does, The Devil's Nebula makes for a reasonably engaging read.

If someone is completely disassembled, and then perfectly reassembled with all (or most) of the same memories, are they the same person?



Mickey7 isn't the first book to try these sorts of questions, but it does handle them in an entertaining and very accesible manner. I would have liked a bit more depth but for what it is, this book is an enjoyable thriller with several nods to some interesting concepts.

Not as powerful as The Expert System's Brother, but still a very effective -- and often bizarre -- consideration of what it means to be human, and what we do to survive.

That was... not great. The pacing of this novel is incredibly slow and this is not helped by the fact that the main characters continue to be stubbornly naive to the point of stupidity.



Admittedly, it does pick up a bit in last few chapters, but nowhere near enough to leave me in any rush whatsoever to start ploughing through the next book in the series.

An excellent overview of the first five years of the Brexit process.



While there's nothing new in here, of course, the book does underline the way in which the delusional and belligerently ignorant approach of Brexiters had managed to take a bad decision and make things so much worse.

This is very much a book of two parts. The second part, which deals with a dystopian future history makes for an interesting, and often surprisingly prescient, future history.



However, London spends the first half of the book detailing his opinions and this does get more than a little preachy at times.