Mixed feelings about this book.

• Dialogue doesn't match the characters. All of it reads too snappily, like Aaron Sorkin. Pontification/surface level commercial action flick quips, and then some serious introspection, but everyone is clever. It's jarring and occasionally cringe, but not a dealbreaker. The story is cool enough that Idk how 2D the characters are.
• Everything in this book is cool. But delivery is sort of weak (hard to do both in this kind of series perhaps?) The focus of the book is the grand story, rather than the characters and their relationships, despite how the author tries. And even then, some of the passages explaining e.g. the politics are a bit too on the nose for my liking. Like X is doing Y to accomplish Z because [[that's their character / political alignment]]. It's easy to read for that reason, but I think a layer of mystery could be gained by 'show don't tell'.

The scene after OPA fight Primagen (which to me is the most important scene in the book):

• Villain named "Dresden" lacks a lot of subtlety lol
• Contrived excuses to do a villain monologuge (already set in motion, you're wasting my time so declaring his position transparently is the fastest path towards continuing it)
• Holden and Miller both internally struggling to reason about why bad man is bad (wtf have y'all been thinking about for half the book), this is like,,, not hard to reason about
• After Miller blasts Dresden (based) and Holden all the sudden remembers "justice", Miller's justification is "I'm a cop" which is perhaps waaaay funnier than the author intended. Not sure if this is commentary on authoritarianism or if Corey/Miller is a Chudd, but Miller definitely isn't supposed to be an uncool character. This is just a vacuous explanation

Mixed feelings towards Miller's ethics, his reaction to the execution of his own ethics, and thus the author's portrayal of him as a grizzled detective as well. According to him, or rather Naomi's understanding of his ethics, he was justified in killing Dresden. This causes beef with the other protag who is the most lukewarm Lawful Good guy u ever met. Thus, by comparison, Miller is supposed to be like at least Neutral Good, Corey wants him to be Chaotic Good, but again acc. to his own ethics he was justified, but then has been having PTSD "plusplus TM" hallucinations racked with guilt and martyring himself on Eros. So even he can't live with his own choice which is like an implicit endorsement of Holden's ethics. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I think that takes a lot of wind out of the sails of the otherwise-interesting question of "what is Right?" in this situation.

Holden's ethics are also paper thin on their own which is weak/problematic characterization IMO for an otherwise cool juxtaposition that drives the back half of this book.

E.g. Holden says "I will never trust a man who unilaterally decides that he has the authority to execute another man." (talking abt Miller) I think that this would actually be a really interesting position to flesh out considering this is the same guy who unilaterally made a lot of decisions early on in the book that directly led to millions of people dying (which is precisely what mkes Miller's killing of Dresden just). But I do actually think that Holden's kind of unilateral action could be justified because it is for the distribution of information for people to make informed decisions themselves? Makes the game theory problem one convergent on perfect info, rather than the asymmetric ethics that aren't even worth reasoning about...

Simply because this book has eeked such reflection out of me, it's good. Thought provoking, but not able to answer or soundly present the questions it itself poses. Will def read on in the series

Maybe woulda benefited from more telegraphing/mystery elements. Many of the twists were not at all forecasted in a way that the reader could have foreseen (contrasting to the really good gotchas from e.g. 3BP).

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