5 Stars Wow, Empress of Forever is an awesome read. Max Gladstone is one of my very favorite authors who writes adult fantasy. This however is borderline hard science fiction. Bold, ambitious, and of course operatic. This is truly an imaginative read. I absolutely loved it.

Max Gladstone is one of my favorite writers. His imagination is a thing of wonder, and his worldbuilding continuously blows me away. This book was no exception. I saw someone describe this as a "gonzo Guardians of the Galaxy" and that's totally fair. It's a space adventure with a rag tag crew of misfits and it is massive in scope and scale. But it's also very Gladstone, which means it's philosophical and mathematical and lyrical and, honestly, just beyond my ken sometimes - but that's okay. I li...

Pitched as 'feminist Guardians of the Galaxy crossed with Star Wars'. I'm like...Yeah.That's me.Hand it over!

That's A Cover...also apparently this is gay, so

There is nothing Guardians of the Galaxy about this book, to start. That would require charm and characters that carry out ridiculous and delightful hijinks.SPOILERS AHEADI want to start by discussing the premise of the book, which has Viv at the top of her evil game of thwarting the law so that she can make the world a better place. The whole human background story gets completely derailed before we get a real understanding of our protagonist's motives or flaws - everything is surface level and...

I think that, around the half way point, I had thought to myself, "Oh, I kinda predicted this would happen". And while, that might have a grain of truth, the ride just kept going, and I kept on enjoying myself as certain twists showed me that there was still so much more to see about this story. Empress of Forever is one of those delightful SF novels where you're shown what imagination can really do with the genre. Like Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief (this being the only SF novel I've read that appro...

I requested this knowing that I loved Gladstone's Craft series, and that he can write an engrossing and unusual fantasy world when he puts his mind to it. Empress of Forever starts a bit like a movie where the Bored Super Rich Person Who Still Doesn't Take It For Granted (I forget which movie that was) Who Walks Away From It All to do something mysterious. The U.S. has become progressively farther along the road to a surveillance state, so the route she takes is complex, and had far too much det...

4.9/5 The crowns trap our selves. They carve us off from the world. But what is the self? There are pieces of me in all of you, and pieces of you in me. We are all empty of inherent form. Trace the threads of each of us, and you find not just the others, but the entire universe. And what crown could bind the whole universe? Empress of Forever is one of those rare books where things go crazy, hodge podge elements are thrown together, conflicts keep escalating, and everything fries your brain in...

2.5/5 starsPraise-worthy imagination and world-building, but sadly, it’s time to admit that Max Gladstone’s books aren’t suitable for me.Empress of Forever has been on my TBR ever since I first heard about it. Judging from the blurb alone, I was immediately intrigued. Just read the blurb, seriously, it sounds so cleverly insane and my god, Gladstone delivers completely on this; stunningly original and cool world-building to witness. That’s exactly what I found to be brilliant from Gladstone’s bo...

This is an action-packed, furiously paced...mess of a novel that I've been trying to read for almost two months. I concede defeat. Watching Max Gladstone try to write a blockbuster space opera is every bit as painful as listening to my favorite indie band going all Coldplay on me. (And not even Coldplay when Coldplay was good.) His quirky imagination - perhaps best exemplified in his necromantic lawyers of Three Parts Dead - is a poor fit for the thrill-a-minute space opera adventure he's trying...

Do I get to write the first review? It's amazing!

My reading group chose Empress of Forever for our September meeting. I went in completely blind, and was disappointed by what I found. It is a space opera with a bog-standard fantasy plot, incomprehensible action, and a half-baked moral message. The cool ideas of the Cloud, the Bleed, and the pilots of Orn fail to redeem the novel.Empress of Forever starts as a really cool story about a billionaire tech mogul using an advanced AI creation to take on a corporate-government conspiracy and free the...

This is one hell of a book, and I didn’t want it to end. Fast-paced, fun, empathetic, with a flavor of Douglas Adams, it’s an ensemble space opera adventure populated by brilliant flawed women. Gladstone has written a universe full of beautiful, weird, original worlds and species, and his prose is stellar. Also it’s super gay.

Empress of Forever is a bit good though the novel is complicated and its length is quite annoying.

▷ Representation: Viv (mc) Chinese-American & lesbian; sapphic scs. Blog • Trigger Warning Database • Twitter • Instagram

This was so anime. A true hearted heroine defeats an unstoppable villain using the power of friendship! I loved it.

First things first: I had a great time. As in, this is a goofy, fast-paced, unabashedly hard-SF, galaxy-spanning space-opera mania that mixes cloud-computing universe-spanning quantum-computing with the afterlife, instant travel, world-eating gods, cyborgs, huge space battles, and a HUGE baddie in the Empress of Forever who is literally impossible to defeat because she IS the substrate of the entire universe I just described. When it comes to the whole grab bag of SF concepts and the way it is a...

Update 11/27/2020 - Ambivalent? Did I really say that? I hate what I read of this and it still brings up feelings of immense frustration. I be absolutely adverse to finishing this book. The reviews only make me more disappointed at this mess. Boring pirates! Ugh.----------------------I am a huge fan of the author's work and so was excited for this excerpt. After reading it, I have to admit that I am ambivalent about this story. I really enjoy the three main characters. But the plot is confusing

Vivian Liao is a Jobs-like tech entrepreneur whose found herself in trouble with the government. While going through her ultimate plan to not-be-waterboarded she's attacked by a bizarre green figure working with technology that might as well be magic. Afterwards she wakes up naked and cocooned in a far future posthuman galaxy where even the substrate of space is programmable, and the whole thing is brutally and capriciously ruled by an all-powerful Empress. As Vivian gathers allies and makes ene...

I tried reading this twice, and both times I got about 5% through and just thought.... it's not working for me. I couldn't make myself care about the kinda Mary Sue-ish rich girl character who gets whisked off for alien adventures or something. Gladstone's Craft Sequence apparently works far better for me.