Too Like the Lightning ★☆☆☆☆

This is the most offensively over-rated novel I have read in years. The world building of the Terra Ignota series is undeniably impressive, but offers me nothing else I want from a story. The prose is so tedious and pretentious it’s hard to believe it’s not a parody — too clever by nine tenths! Story and character are suffocated under a dense sludge of exposition devoted almost exclusively to politics, philosophy, and the narrator’s bizarre affectations and preoccupations (e.g. with gendered language). It is nearly impossible to tell what the hell is even going on. Most good science fiction requires the reader to climb a learning curve, but this novel asks far too much and returns much too little.

I don’t know what bothers me more: the novel itself, or that it has so many fans!