“The Faith of Beasts” by James S. A. Corey

This was decent sci-fi, but I don’t know. It somehow moved both too slowly and too quickly.

A lot happens, technically. Humanity is still trying to survive, still trying to understand what is going on, still trying to find some kind of leverage. But emotionally and strategically it also feels like we barely moved. We spent a whole book getting from “we are very screwed” to “we are still very screwed, but maybe there is one weird trick.”

And the weird trick is where I’m struggling a bit.

Humanity finds a weakness, sure. But it is such a basic weakness that I was surprised nobody had really tried it before. Maybe there is more going on. Maybe the third book will complicate it. Maybe this is only the first crack in a much larger system.

But if this is basically how humanity wins, I’ll be disappointed.

That said, I still like the world. I still like the scale. I still like the deeply uncomfortable feeling of humans being ants in someone else’s imperial machinery. The book does that part very well.

I just don’t know how they wrap this up in one more book. It feels like there is too much left, but also somehow not enough has happened yet. Which is a strange place to be.

So yeah. Solid, readable, interesting. But I’m reserving judgment until the ending. This could either become a great trilogy, or one of those stories where the setup was much better than the solution.