Alex > Recent Status Updates

Apparently, Kiva took some poor refugees, too. That improves her character, but not sadly not the whole novel. It's almost entirely run-on dialogue, with almost no action. No character so much as observes his surroundings or engages in some navelgazing.

Kiva is not a lovable rogue, she's just a scumbag.

"Close up Sivouren Donher was middle-aged, a little puffy, and had a look on his face that twitched between arrogance and anxiety so quickly that Kiva was certain he wasn’t aware his head was doing that. It was a look of someone who until the last few days was pretty sure he could ride out whatever nonsense this rebellion was about, and then suddenly realized he couldn’t."
First visual character description.

The second chapter is also really good, and excellent reading in light of the corona pandemic!

Also, stoner culture will still exist more than a thousand years into the future. They will even be called stoners.

Air traffic control, on the other hand, will exist, but not be taken very serious. Fly a plane (or "skimmer") around in a war zone? Please don't do it again, citizen. Pretty please.

A quarter into the story, we find out how the Interdependency is organized and what kind of network the Flow forms. The new information about Hub could've been summed up in a few off-handed sentences, which also would've done wonders for the atmosphere. Also, another named character? Do we really need an ensemble? Dresden Files and Project Nemesis did that far better.

I really remember Scalzi being better with voice. His main character here doesn't sound the least bit like an empress.

Three chapters, three sets of characters. Every single character is snarky and swears excessively, not a single one knows how to use the words "literally" and "basically" properly.

Where do I even start with this? The prose and the structure are like something written by a complete amateur.

Very good information on St. Gregory the Great and St. Sebastian, and their respective roles in the pandemic.

Saint Cyprian of Carthage consoled Christians that the intention to be martyred would already be judged as good by God, even if one was deprived of martyrdom by dying from the plague.

The plague may have played a role in the settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans, of Arabs in Syria, and of Lombards in Italy.

Saint Benedict of Nursia was the first to give a positive connotation to labor and to discourage leisure. He also counted reading as a labor.

The bits about Trajans agrarian policy were as exciting as that topic sounds, but the chapter on the Dacians is off to a very good start.

First chapter and there was a dialogue with no less than five speaking roles and the line "uhhhh", and he used the word "literally" in a superfluous sense. Who edited this?

Saint Gregory of Tours averted the town of a plague with his prayers, as an angel informed him. Saint Gregory the Great became Pope during the pandemic. The descriptions of the plague sound quite apocalyptic.

Trajan went even further than Nerva in liberalizing tax laws.