Thank you for a sober and much-needed review. I read the books last year looking for the same things, and came up with similar takeaways. I was awestruck by the story's scope and weird ideas, and even though 1) you could see everything hinged on strawmanning (American?) liberalism, 2) the grand game theory games were oversold, and 3) the character work is shoddy and full of backwards gender stuff. I was more than happy to read it as, as someone else pointed out, a mega-scale meditation on Moloch, even though by the end it has stooped to literally sighing a fatherly "you have too rosy a view of things" at us. I... (read more)
Thank you for a sober and much-needed review. I read the books last year looking for the same things, and came up with similar takeaways. I was awestruck by the story's scope and weird ideas, and even though 1) you could see everything hinged on strawmanning (American?) liberalism, 2) the grand game theory games were oversold, and 3) the character work is shoddy and full of backwards gender stuff. I was more than happy to read it as, as someone else pointed out, a mega-scale meditation on Moloch, even though by the end it has stooped to literally sighing a fatherly "you have too rosy a view of things" at us. I... (read more)