Characters there are also pretty flat, often, and the plots pretty simple.

There are also strange creatures that arrive in swarms to devour that cloud, providing justification and sort-of explanation for some of the wars and genocides going on.Īt some point I started to question my positive view of the Craft Sequence. It actually is a data cloud, and the inhabitants of this world have their souls uploaded there, which allows them to survive the death of their physical bodies – which has predictable consequences of lessening the cost of violence. Gladstone’s main strength is worldbuilding, and while I don’t like the universe he created here, there is one interesting thing – The Cloud. I imagine if Elon Musk wrote a Mary Sue-ish fanfic it would result in something like that. The main superheroine was conquering the enemies here just like she conquered her competitors in science and business back on Earth. It did not really feel like a science fiction, more like a mediocre superhero movie, with barely sketched demigods destroying fleets and worlds. It’s one of the dangers of Audiobooks – and I confess I succumbed to this several times – when you loose an interest, your thoughts tend to wonder away. They travel, they fight… but with no emotional attachment to any of the characters, I could not make myself interested. Universe that I found pretty boring, inhabited by cultists and pirates, and demigods – which sounds more fun than it is 😉 I found all the characters to be trope-ish, flat and boring, although less annoying than the self-righteous protagonist.

Stuff happens, and off she goes into far-future, kidnapped by a very powerful being that rules the universe. We meet our heroine, a kind of female Elon Musk with all the empathy and selflessness of the real-world one, on Earth in the near future. Not only I disliked this novel, I even judge his earlier works a bit more harshly – as some of the flaws here so visible were also present there, only hidden behind all the good stuff.

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone