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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9791988" data-attributes="member: 18">My brother has been trying to get us to play this for ages, hoping we can in January maybe.Reading-wise I've recently read finished two extremely good books, and am most of the way through a pretty interesting one.So I read The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. Now I'm not previously a fan of Bennett. I didn't really enjoy or even really respect Foundryside. It was clever but it felt a bit hollow. I never read any of his other books as a result.However, The Tainted Cup won the Hugo, and that raised an eyebrow for me, so I looked into reviews and it sounded like there was a lot of praise.Was that praise justified? In my opinion - absolutely it was.Everything about The Tainted Cup is pretty great for my money. I liked the characters a lot - sure it's Sherlock and Watson kinda, but that dynamic sticks around because it's a very good dynamic for mystery novels, and Dinios Kol (our 'Watson' and perspective character) is a pretty interesting and I find, relatable, guy. The world-building is very strong - a biohacking empire driven to the brink by the need to protect itself from a sort of Pacific Rim (the movie) situation, and it's very consistent and clearly deeply considered. The unusual abilities characters have are all from this bioware/biohacking stuff, and tend to pretty messed-up and with significant downsides. The mystery in The Tainted Cup was extremely well-executed - I think maybe borderline a little too obvious but I didn't guess the whole plot instantly or anything, I was just ahead of the characters most of the time, which I think often happens in a good mystery novel. Every kind of scene is written very well, as well, which is unusual in my experience, and there's a real continuous tension and feeling of oppression appropriate to the setting. It's never comfortable or safe and I mean that in a very complementary way.A Drop of Corruption I think is maybe an A-grade to the S-grade of The Tainted Cup. It has moments where it's really profoundly strange and entrancing, as well as some good character growth. The mystery is more complex and I think a little less engaging because it's less human (also as soon as a certain character appears you pretty much know what's going on), but the juxtaposition of the wierd bio-empire with a more traditional-seeming fantasy setting is quite effective, and I appreciate the focus on serfdom situations and how oppressive those are (sometime a lot of fantasy sort of plasters over).I'm now most of the way through The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson which, initially, seems like it's just going to be some YA nonsense where people are put into silly themed/stereotyped factions at majority and then some of them have to do a competition for a big prize (yawn), and like, technically that kind of does happen, but by that point, the book has book something extremely different, a first a murder-mystery and then a very different kind of thriller, and the main character is a 34-year-old woman of a not very fantasy-lead-esque kind. I had quite a lot of criticism for this for the excessive amount of anachronism (particularly re: food & clothes, like, there's no way these people have clothing sizes, hell people that rich now don't use sized clothing, come on), and the weird isolation the empire exists in seems hard-to-explain, but as the book goes on you do gradually see a lot of the bland claims characters make kind of unravelling or being nuanced, and thus get some idea that there might be some unreliable-ness to the claims characters make (and those of the narrator, who isn't truly omniscient, merely present in quite a few places at once).Also and importantly, the mysteries and plot twists in The Raven Scholar, are I would say extremely well-executed, and I guessed wrong a bunch of times, absolutely walked into traps of "obvious assumption" and thinking tropes would play out trope-ily. And I respect and like this a lot, because in cases, if I hadn't been making assumptions I could potentially have guessed what was actually going on - like, most/all of the clues were there. I made a lot of the same assumptions the protagonist did too.I'm still about 20% from the end and there is one thing I find completely implausible but I suspect what I'm actually seeing is that the plan I'd been assuming some of the antagonists had is not, in fact, their plan, and that's why it doesn't make sense.</blockquote>

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