The story behind this book is almost as interesting as the one in it. It essentially started as a piece of personal fan fiction based on a beloved sci-fi novel which the author liked so much that he went and got permission from the various rights-holders to publish it. And for fanfic, it’s really good.

In general, I’m a fan of Scalzi’s work. I enjoyed his Old Man’s War series, I read his blog religiously, I read the film column he had for a couple years, I read the random short stories he sometimes pops up with on Tor.com, etc. I think he’s a good writer with a knack for finding a good story. His stuff is always good fun for light-reading days.

And Fuzzy Nation is no exception. It’s probably as good as the original (which I read when Scalzi announced the publication of his own Fuzzy book and linked to the original on Project Gutenberg), though I don’t like Scalzi’s twist at the end which felt way too deus-ex-machina to me.

But that one nitpick aside, Fuzzy Nation is very entertaining and easy to read. I would highly suggest it as a nice pick-me-up during the upcoming dog days of summer. You could probably read the whole thing in an afternoon on the beach and you’d feel pretty good about it.

This is a much more serious review of the game.

Spoilers Abound Below This Line

The series began with an innovative and highly-praised RPG-with-shooter-elements that set a new benchmark for player choices, in-game dialog, and videogame world-building.

It continued into a highly-praised shooter-with-RPG-elements that set a new benchmark for game-world-changes-based-on-actions-in-a-previous-game1 and planet scanning while continuing and improving on much of the dramatic and cinematic work of its predecessor.

With millions of players heavily invested in a personalized story and a unique Commander Shepard (not to mention the first and second games having Metacritic scores of 91% and 96%, respectively), this final piece of the trilogy had some gigantic expectations to fulfill.

And in many ways, Bioware succeeded. The game is filled with touching moments from the friends Shepard (and the player) has made over the years. From incidental things like Garrus lamp-shading his constant gun calibration or Vega and Garrus trying to prove who’s a bigger bad-ass or Garrus and Joker swapping human and Turian jokes (Garrus is something of a fan favorite, especially to this fan) to plot-significant stuff like both Mordin and Legion getting fantastic death scenes, there’s a lot of closure for these characters.

And even when it doesn’t exactly provide closure (because not every story necessarily closes), the game gives you an excellent sense of where these characters are now and how far that might be from where they’ve come.

A good example of this sort of thing is Tali. When we met her five years ago, she was (presumably) a fresh-faced kid just starting out on her road to adulthood by proving her worth to her people. Now, she’s an admiral of the Quarian Fleet with a place to call home on Rannoch. We even watch her get drunk and possibly start a relationship with Garrus. It’s great.

In many parts of the game, the narrative structure is so solid and impactful that it made me stop short when I finally realized the one dreadful fact about the game: Mass Effect 3 was released unfinished.

I suppose the first instance of this is the famed “Face Bug” that was only fixed a month after the game was released. With no sense of hyperbole, I found this bug to be devastating. Over the course of the past two games, I’d developed a genuine emotional attachment to my Kate Shepard. I knew how she felt about things. I knew who she liked, disliked, and loved. I knew that she’d always do the right thing even when it wasn’t the easiest way. Kate was the sort of person who wouldn’t abandon her mission or her friends, even overcoming death to do right by the galaxy.

So when the game wouldn’t let me import her the way I knew her? Yeah. That made me angry. It felt like Bioware saw no value in the emotional engagement they’d created between me and this character. I didn’t even play the game for a couple of weeks while I waited for a patch to come out. Finally, when no patch was forthcoming, I loaded up Mass Effect 2, posed my Shepard so I could see every angle, and snapped pictures of the TV screen. My artist-spouse then spent a good hour in the M3 character creator rebuilding Kate as well as could be managed. We joked that Shepard had had some work done; but it only gave us hollow laughter.

To make it worse, there’s no reason this bug should even exist. I’m a software developer who works with professional QA folk every day and I know how they think. It’s inconceivable that the QAs at Bioware wouldn’t have written a test case that says “Fully import a custom character from ME1, carried through ME2″. I can only assume that some manager somewhere decided that this sort of testing would take too much time and refused to allow it in the test schedule. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened because you can see that mindset throughout the entire game and it ultimately weakens the entire thing.

If you were fortunate enough to not notice (or care about) the face bug, that mindset is then most obvious in the planet scanning mini-game.

Mass Effect featured planetary exploration via the Mako tank. Because of fan complaints about these Mako sections, Mass Effect 2 swapped it out for a mini-game where you could select each planet in a star system and manually scan it for resources, collectibles, or even small missions. But the fans complained again (and rightly so!), so Bioware needed to find a different way to express galactic exploration.

They decided to keep the basic idea of scanning planets but they greatly simplified it (aided in large part by removing the resource acquisition element of the game). Now, you have a long-range scanner that lets you scan large parts of a system to see if there’s anything of interest. Only if your long-range scanner finds something on a planet are you able to access something that looks like the old planetary scanner from ME2. Which would be all well and good. But Bioware decided that they needed to add a catch.

Every time you use your long-range scanner in a system, it starts to alert the Reapers. When their alertness meter becomes full, they start to chase you around the system and force you to abandon that system until after you’ve finished another mission. I’ve seen this aspect of the game dubbed “Reaper Pac-Man” and it’s a fitting description. The effect of Reaper Pac-Man is to make side-quests (which require you to try to find things in systems) extremely tedious and frustrating. I eventually gave up and just turned to the Internet so I could zero in on the needed planets without having to search for them.

It’s difficult to believe that anyone at Bioware would use the term “fun” to describe Reaper Pac-Man. Yet, here it is. It feels like something where they had the nugget of an idea (now that the Reapers are here, they should get in the way of galactic exploration!) but didn’t have the time to iterate on and polish that idea. But they left it in anyway because they just couldn’t be bothered to fix it.

You see this mindset again on Rannoch where you have to shoot a targeting laser into a Reaper’s maw. There’s nothing else like this segment in the entire series. It’s truly one-off. I wasn’t the only person who had a lot of trouble with getting past this part. The game never teaches you how to play this type of game and the controls don’t really work for it. And, of course, it just isn’t very fun. Again, it feels like Bioware didn’t have the time to make this segment good but they didn’t have the discipline to take it out.

Time after time, you come across this sort of thing. If it were once or twice, I could chalk it up to the costs of getting anything done in the high-paced world of blockbuster game development. But it’s so often and so in your face that I can only reach one conclusion: Bioware just didn’t care.

Most importantly, they didn’t care to put the same amount of work into the writing as they did in previous games where player decisions directly affected the story. Instead, they went with a one-size fits all approach.

If you saved the Rachni Queen in Mass Effect, she is controlled by Reapers in Mass Effect 3. If you killed the Rachni Queen in Mass Effect, the Reapers build a clone of her in Mass Effect 3 so that the story doesn’t have to change.

If you cure the genophage, the Salarians refuse to ally with you. Then they suddenly have a change of heart after the next mission so the story doesn’t have to change.

If you gave the Illusive Man the Collector Base in Mass Effect 2 he’s no more or less pissed at you in Mass Effect 3 than if you destroyed it. Otherwise, the story might have to change.

And this goes on and on. In the first two games, the decisions you made felt like they rippled out throughout the narrative universe of the game. In this final one, they adjust small changes in your “effective military strength”: a single number which was put in place to drive the ending of the game. Customizing the story for your actions is really hard. Doing math on a single number is easy. And Bioware just didn’t care enough to do the harder work.

Which finally brings me to the ending. Others have explained the faults of the ending far better than I could. So I’ll simply sign on with a “Me Too” for most of that.

For the themes of this review, though, I think the ending has flaws beyond poor narrative structure. Where your effective military strength was touted as the method for customizing the ending to all of your past decisions, it ended up being incredibly underwhelming for all of that.

Ultimately, this number decides the way Earth looks at the end (completely burned out or merely damaged), if 3 team members inexplicably walk out of the Normandy at the end, and if Shepard takes a final breath. That’s it.

No matter what, the Reaper threat is settled. No matter what, the Normandy crashes for some reason. No matter what, galactic civilization is ended as the mass relays are destroyed.

There’s no real narrative effect from the number whose entire purpose is to drive narrative effect.

I imagine that taking in hundreds of decisions from across three games and making them all narratively coherent would be extremely difficult. But this is the task that they chose for themselves and they had millions of dollars to use to pull it off. But they didn’t even try.

They didn’t care.

That word “They” there is incredibly unfair. Clearly, some people on the team did care. You can’t bring closure to Mordin’s story as spectacularly as they did without caring. You can’t bring such emotional impact for the Quarians regaining their home without caring. You can’t write and act the joy into Wrex’s dialog about becoming a father without caring. Clearly, the team in the trenches cared. And clearly, they were overruled time and again by their overseers.

And those overseers cared less about a game that they spent millions of dollars and years working on than I cared about it after spending only $60 and dozens of hours on. This is almost incomprehensible.

As a shooter, it’s fine. I don’t like shooters and much and don’t find anything to recommend it over the original Mass Effect‘s gameplay. ME3 is at least as fun as ME2. So there’s nothing to complain about (except for when they try to throw in a completely different game like the Rannoch Reaper or the Kai Leng fights). I’d have preferred more RPG and less shooter, but I clearly lost that argument the last time around so there’s no need to let it cloud my judgement of this game.

And that judgement is both clear and unfortunate.

Overall, the Mass Effect series is great, bordering on fantastic. But this final game in the trilogy is merely okay bordering on good. Every time it tries to soar to new heights, it’s brought crashing back to earth by the sloppiness in so much of the writing and gameplay decisions. And that’s a shame, because it had more promise and raw potential than anything I’ve ever played before.

In lieu of a point or star rating, I’ll simply say this: I won’t be pre-ordering the next Bioware game (Dragon Age 3?). Instead, I’ll just buy it used when one of my friends is done with it. If Bioware isn’t going to care, why should I?

This book has more problems with its predecessors. Those problems are so frequently spread throughout the book (or even an inherent part of its plot) that I was already planning a 3-star review to show how it was so much more diminished than its fore-bearers.

And then I caught myself staying up way too late to keep reading it.

And then I caught myself doing it again the next night.

And whoa. How can I criticize that? Well, okay. I’m me. I can criticize most things. And this book does suffer a bit in comparison to the other two.

There’s way too much sex in this book: instead of merely hinting at the more delicious pleasures, it turns almost pornographic at points. And it’s too often. Where the other books inserted* sex naturally as part of being human (or divine), this one turns to it so often that it starts to feel more like the fanfics of an out-of-control adolescent.

It’s probably a matter of taste more than anything, and my tastes have always turned away from such things when they interrupt the plot. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but it’s just not my cup of tea to find so much of this in an otherwise-excellent fantasy novel.

The larger issue comes from the story being told from Sieh’s viewpoint. The other stories were told from the viewpoints of mortals trying to cope with the divine. This one told the story of a divine trying to come to grips with the mortal world. It was hard for me to empathize with Sieh, as he kept telling us over and over again how much greater he was than anything I’ve experienced. In that context, his character flaws become egregious since they’re all on-purpose in one way or another. He used to be god after all. He could have done better. Ultimately, I found it hard to sympathize with him or care about him and I can’t help but wonder how it would have been told from Dekarta’s point of view.

The ending was disappointing, but I think the reason of its disappointment tells how successful both the ending and the entire trilogy have been. For three books, Jemisin has made me feel the divine wonder of the Three. And while the world may not have been a better place with their presence and intervention, it was made so much richer because of it. I found their withdrawal to be utterly depressing because it means the world is going to become a drab and colorless place in contrast to what it was.

Though, perhaps the average lifespan will go up. So it’s probably an improvement for the characters who live there. But for this outsider? It’s incredibly sad.

And that sadness is why I would whole-heartedly endorse this trilogy. It’s a masterwork of fantasy without elves or wizards. The rich cosmology, depth of feeling, complex characters, and page-turning plots is unmatched in my library.

*::giggle::

This is the second book in a trilogy. I read the first in a single day because I couldn’t put it down, the first time I’d read a book so quickly since my days at university. Given how much I enjoyed that first book, its sequel had a lot to live up to.

And it succeeded for the most part. I didn’t attack it quite as voraciously as I did before; but perhaps that was just a matter of free time.

The only real “flaw” with this book is that it assumes a working knowledge of everything in the first one. Which would ordinarily be fine (and even great since Jemisin doesn’t waste time re-introducing us to everything) except it turns out that I was so busy enjoying The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that I didn’t actually absorb much from it. So I was a bit confused at times but even then Jemisin made it work. Eventually, it all starts to make sense no matter your knowledge of this universe.

All in all, this is truly excellent fantasy and a gem for the genre. The trilogy as a whole would probably make a good introduction to fantasy for the average person since it doesn’t rely on the shared knowledge of elves and dwarves and such. The magic in these books is different from most of the rest of the genre and that’s just great.

I highly recommend this one.

In some ways, it’s hard to envy Sanderson. For this penultimate novel of the series, he had to start wrapping up at least a dozen plot lines and convincingly moving all of the main characters (And armies. And nations.) to the spot of the Last Battle so that that Battle could be the focus of the final volume. That had to be tough.

It’s a credit to him that he managed it at all, let alone as well as he did.

He managed to avoid a lot of the traps that Jordan started writing himself into like an abundance of politics. While there was some unavoidable politicking going on (most of the main characters are queens and emperors and lords, after all), Sanderson kept it to a very basic level. Part of that might be that the characters are all pretty powerful as rulers at this point so they wouldn’t necessarily be forced to engage in the tedious Daes Dae’mar they used to gain that power. But I think Sanderson made the authorial choice to leave all of that behind.

Instead, every political scene is short and and sandwiched between two good action scenes. It really helped this book be a page turner.

Unfortunately, while it may have been the lesser-of-all-possible-evils, that relentless focus on action also costs this book half a star from me. One of the things I like most about the Wheel of Time is the magic system. Sure, it gets a little expositionial at times but I’ve really enjoyed the more technical discussions of the One Power over the course of the series. This book skipped all that. When characters channel, magic just happens. It’s fine, but it’s a bit of a letdown since so much of the magic system in the series so far has been written directly to my taste.

The other half star loss (compared to its predecessor, “The Gathering Store” which got 4 stars from me) comes from the breakneck pacing. As I noted, Sanderson was given the unenviable job of wrapping up 12 giant novels worth of plot lines. He managed it by speeding through all of them one after another. I didn’t feel like I got to spend much time in the heads of anyone (with the possible exception of Perrin and somewhat less so of Mat). And that’s a shame. But I suppose that’s what happens when you have so many main characters: some are bound to get lost. I just think too many got lost this time around.

Still, Sanderson has finally managed to make me a legitimate fan of the series. I thank him for it.

When I get sucked in to a piece of fiction, I often find myself mirroring the style of the text in my private thoughts. This can manifest in something as simple as altering my vocabulary a little to finding myself unconsciously mimicking the characters.

So it’s a great compliment to this book when I say “Over the past weeks, I’ve kept having to stop myself from thinking I was Rand or Egwene.” This is not something that has been a problem for the other books in this series. I guess whatever that ineffable something is that fantasy authors have, Sanderson brought it.

The major complaints I’ve had with Jordan’s work were all solved by Sanderson. He kept the main characters and villains in the forefront and the secondary characters on the sidelines so I was never overwhelmed with names. He avoided tedious and complex political maneuvering in favor of strong action scenes. Most importantly, perhaps, he didn’t spend chapters on spankings. Thank the Light for that.

Some of the other problems, especially in established characterizations, he avoided by the simple expedient of sidelining the worst offenders.

Instead, Sanderson focused on magic and action: the meat and potatoes of high fantasy. I don’t know that it was strictly his doing (perhaps Jordan had always intended to change the focus for this part of the story), but it was a welcome change. The only real complaint I have with this book is that it’s too far into the story to serve as an introduction to the series.

Hopefully, the next two volumes will continue in the same vein. If so, the entire series will be worthwhile.

Bravo.

I’ve done a disservice to this book: I read it over the course of two months. It’s not a long book or a particularly challenging book; but things kept coming up and I didn’t get to spend as much time on it as I’d have liked.

As a practical effect, this means that I jumped from chapter to chapter with weeks between them. This is not conducive to either retention or reflection. So I am left without much to say about Mr. Jefferson or his times. And that’s almost a tragedy since, while I was physically reading it, I thought that this book offered several insights into both of those subjects.

Of course, this is far from an exhaustive volume on the subject. It’s short and Hitchens jumps around in the timeline, skipping great swaths of Jefferson’s life and cutting out many (undoubtedly important) details. Instead, Hitchens picks and chooses what he writes about to focus on Jefferson’s place in American morality and spirituality.

The issue of morality, of course, is overwhelmed by Jefferson’s feelings an actions around chattel slavery: the great moral evil of my people. Hitchens paints a picture of a Jefferson at war with himself over his own innate selfishness, his drive to be a force for good and justice, and his fear of what would happen to powerful white men like himself if the slaves were freed and able to take revenge for the cruelties they’d been subjected to.

Hitchens never draws Jefferson as an exonerated saint or a cartoon villain: instead, he shows Jefferson as a flawed human trying to deal with a complicated situation and making the wrong choices.

In contrast, Jefferson’s rational and Enlightened view of religion is much more inline with Hitchens’ own views. In discussing Jefferson’s religious activities, he does not intend to bury Jefferson and instead uses his own words as counterexamples to modern demagogues attempting to usurp Jefferson for their own causes.

And that’s largely where the book ends. It contents itself with slavery and religion (and, to a far more minor degree, Federalism and Republicanism). If you want more about Jefferson, you’ll need to find it elsewhere.

But, even if this is will be only a short stop in your Jeffersonian education, I do recommend it. The topics that Hitchens explores are important and Jefferson did a lot to shape modern America in regards to them. It’s also a well-written book: it’s charming and funny while never being dry.

I look forward to re-reading it again some day soon. Hopefully, I will find myself able to devote more attention to it then. Because I think it deserves it.

This is the final Wheel of Time book to be penned solely by Robert Jordan, so it seems like it’s worth pausing to consider the series as a whole at this point before diving into Sanderson’s take on the work.

And as a whole, the series works. It’s entertaining. I’m not sure I would actually recommend it to anyone, but I don’t have to: it’s popularity recommends it for itself.

There is some interesting room for discussion. Jordan’s treatment of female characters is often remarked upon. But I think he mis-writes his women in the exact same way he mis-writes his men. I don’t think it’s misogyny so much as an ability to write rational adults. Everyone in this series is a manipulative, conniving, un-trusting and largely untrustworthy idiot. Everyone has secret plans for everyone else. Everyone is certain that they deserve special treatment above everyone else. Everyone goes out of their way to not reveal important information to everyone else. It goes on and on.

But this behavior stands out for the female characters more-so than their male counterparts because this is how shrews and bitches have been long portrayed in our society. The exact same behavior doesn’t ping for the men because men never need to prove that they aren’t all of those things.

So I think it’s too simplistic to say “Jordan can’t write women.” or even “Jordan hates women.” I think it’s closer to “Jordan can’t write anyone at all, and he never notices that his privileged position means he has to try harder for the women.” I don’t say this to excuse him, but merely to point out that his literary sins extend far beyond “She folded her arms beneath her breasts.*”

And then there’s the spanking. I don’t even know what to think about the spanking. Again, spankings (and the threat of spankings) are used by both men and women in these books; but it’s way creepier when a man suddenly throws a non-consenting woman over his knee. My own take on it pretty much stops at “Adults do not solve their personal disputes in this manner!” but if you want to read a deep-seated misogyny into it, I won’t argue with you. It’s really disturbing.

Aside from that (which is a pretty big aside!), the story feels too complicated in general. There are enough characters that I don’t really know who is who or where they are or what they’re doing anymore. I’m constantly having to look up minor characters on the Wheel of Time Wiki just to get the basic facts about them when they show up in the story.

In a previous review, I believe I complained that there were too many villains. Now there’s too many characters in general. There are also too many main plots and subplots and small plots and who knows what else. I think I have the general outline of what’s happened over the past eleven books, but I wouldn’t be able to sketch it out for anyone.

At this point, I’m enjoying the books scene-by-scene and not worrying too much about how those scenes interconnect. For everything else, there’s the wiki.

And I don’t think there was ever an actual Knife of Dreams: if there was, I completely missed it in one of the subplots. The titles of the books have all been pretty literal plot-points until now. I don’t know what that means going forward, but it feels like a sudden change. 

* Although, that’s a pretty big literary sin. He uses that construction fifteen times in this book alone.

• We’re incredibly used to our Playstation 3′s Bluetooth remote control. We keep forgetting to point the remote at the AppleTV. This feels archaic.
• The new episode of Psych, which aired last night, is not available on the iTunes store. I thought things were supposed to appear the day-after. What’s the point?
• Content-availability aside, the AppleTV seems like a phenomenal device to funnel money from us to Apple. We’re probably going to start renting movies on it: and we have a Netflix DVD account! I think we’ll also end up with several season passes of TV shows if iTunes actually has the content available next-day.
• We knew that Hulu wouldn’t be an app on the device, but we’d expected to be able to stream it from our iPhones or iPads. Nope. Hulu doesn’t do AirPlay.
• Pandora does do AirPlay and it’s quite nice.
• The AppleTV doesn’t have a setting to determine if audio goes out through the HDMI port or the optical port. You get both all the time. It seems that Tim has a less complicated home theater setup than we do.
• If the NHL offered à la carte hockey games, they’d get some money from me. But I’m not going to subscribe to their entire season lineup so they’ll just have to do without.
• As soon as possible, I’m going to jailbreak it so it can run Plex.

It’s not a bad little box for the price and I think we’ll be happy with it. For the most part, a Roku box would have been far more appropriate for us; but AirPlay is just such a compelling feature that we decided to go with this for now. Hopefully it can be jailbroken to be almost as useful as a Roku. If not? Who knows. Maybe we’ll buy a Roku too.

I pre-ordered. I signed up for Origins. I typed in that ridiculous code to enforce multiplayer only for thems what can pay. I did it all.

So why won’t you give Kate Shepherd back to me?! Who is this stranger you’ve replaced her with?! Give her back! You monsters!

What else do I have to do?! Do I have to buy a Kinect? I’ll buy a Kinect! I’ll leave the money in a brown paper envelope behind the cistern in the men’s room at the bus station. You’ll get your money.

Just give me back my Commander.

You monsters.

0-out-of-5 Stars