The first book is good, and I enjoyed it, but the sequel steps everything up in significant ways to outshine the first. And its setting around Christmas and a high school staging of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol makes this one work better for this time of year than Halloween, or the summer when both the books have been released.
… And so we come to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The City of Last Chances. With the recent publication of the third book in this ‘verse, Days of Shattered Faith, I thought it would be good to take a look at how the series began.
Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye exceeds expectations from the first novel because White so effectively maintains the tight plotting (with nice twists) and pacing while expanding a lot of the world building and filling in a lot of uncertainties from August Kitko and the Mechas from Space, particularly concerning the nature of the rogue AI Infinite and its Vanguard creations.
It’s probably not a great sign that as every major character in MADI appeared, I could tell exactly what niche each of them would fill in a cyberpunk TTRPG.
After a man is found dead due to a huge plant having suddenly sprouted from within his body, the investigator and her assistant quickly determine that this is no ordinary, accidental contagion. Their investigation and other events take them from a small frontier town to a metropolis full of factions and intrigues, from jurisdictional disputes to economic entanglements, as more deaths are discovered and a conspiracy unfolds that threatens the Empire itself.
“… Pohl’s thesis, in this book, is that people are a mixture of nature AND nurture. The relatively retiring Nicky DeSota IS the same person as the hardbitten general, or the philandering Senator, and when push comes to shove, they can transcend their natures, or their upbringing, as the case may be. …”
