User Profile

This book feels like a prologue to The Drawing of the Three and the epic to follow. I'll be honest: I'm not certain readers would be missing much if they skipped The Gunslinger entirely and relied solely on "The Argument" at the beginning of The Drawing of the Three to catch them up 🤷‍♂️

If you want to quickly catch up on the state of fascism in the USA, this is a great resource; if you want a detailed history, read the books Evans quotes throughout The War On Everyone, or listen to select episodes of his podcast, Behind the Bastards.

If you think you already know that nuclear weapons are a nightmare, you don't. I promise you.

Read this book. Then tell everyone you know about it. Call and write your representatives in government, ask them to read it.

Then ask them to work to rid the world of this nightmare before it ends us all.

Rubicon is a fun, quick read about an "immortal" soldier, her fancy combat suit, and the snarky AI in her brain. The book reads like a novelization of a military sci-fi FPS video game, complete with a combat scene that features the protagonist's squad facing off against a large boss creature after fighting off a bunch of smaller critters. I'm not complaining—this is exactly the sort of book I was looking for as a short break between longer series—but if there was a video game version, I'd probably recommend that you just play that instead.

I enjoyed this book very much, both for its approach to fantasy through Chinese (rather than European) culture and for its basis in real-world history. The last third of this book is filled with the graphic horrors of fascists at war, so I wouldn't recommend this for young readers. (Thinking of my niece, who loves to read.) I particularly like the end of the book, because in the end our hero commits an act of fascist evil herself, and we are forced to think about things like the nature of justice, the cost of vengeance, and the dangers of power. Looking forward to jumping into The Dragon Republic!

Shorter than I would have liked, but an excellent read. A reminder that it is our choices—not the circumstances of our births—that make us good or bad in the end.

All glory to Enth, Hero of the Dark!