Wow, this had like zero impact on me whatsoever. I think it's a me thing rather than a Ken Liu thing though – nothing was bad or wrong with the book, I just found the narration style/structure of the book super boring. Few of the characters felt like they had personality, and the "history" aspect of the narration (as opposed to leveraging character's POVs to communicate the same information about the world) made it so that much of the trivia was in one ear and out the other.

IT feels discordant, lacking narrative fabric (in part?) due to the decision to use omniscient and impersonal 3rd person. I can't tell waht the book is trying to do well. Sometimes it spends pages and pages waxing poetic about military strategy and specific troop movements across ficticious landscapes (that probably don't have much permanent significance) and then Liu fast forwards three years so that –in the span of like 2 pages– years of starvation, siege, war crimes, etc. just go out the window so the two warring characters can make up and be friends again. Like what??? was the point of all that???

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