Very much in keeping with the rest of the Xuya books and i absolutely recommend reading them before diving into this deep space.
A lot longer than the previous short stories and novellas that we’ve so far been used to: as such, this one is available as a real book that you can buy over at Amazon.
For those reading my previous review on Pearl, you’ll now know how i feel about pricing and this is no different to that. At the time of writing this the brand new paperback is £7.75 while the Kindle version is £7.34. And Amazon will deliver the paperback for free if you buy something else from them for £2.25 to make the total £10.00.
However, i’m not going to get back into my rant on the pricing of a teeny tiny data file compared to a forest of processed trees and environmental damages of such, you can read all about that at Pearl. Like that, it’s up to you if you are willing to pay that or not, or you can simply get a copy elsewhere, like get your local library to buy the paperback and then a thousand people can read it for free. Or you can buy the paperback with free delivery and then sell it on ebay to make some money back, or share it with a few friends, or give it to a charity shop. At the end of the day, it’s up to you, but ebooks aren’t going to be priced fairly for what they are if people — you the reader — keep paying silly prices for them. It’s utterly ridiculous to be charging every Kindle user similar prices for a single use, data protected copy while the paperback can be bought once and shared and read by dozens of people for years and years.
So, onto the content: great story, this time we’re going into the deep spaces within the deep spaces. Yeah, deep spaces squared get seriously bizarre. Lots of court intrigue and military invasion matters and the normal everyday life things as well.
Once again, super great writing from Aliette that keeps your attention from beginning to end. Shame about the ebook pricing.
And now let’s go get Scattered Along the River of Heaven.
Aliette’s Page