Book Review: Cytonic, by Brandon Sanderson
Feb. 7th, 2022 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inverarityThe YA space opera continues, and reads more and more like fanfiction.
Delacorte Press, 2021, 415 pages
Brandon Sanderson, you exasperate me at times.
I complain about the guy an awful lot considering how often I read his books. I mean, he's reliably entertaining. His writing hits all the pleasure centers of the nerd brain without ever really challenging you. Superheroes! Epic fantasy! Space opera! He can write it all, and he will write with familiar, well-worn tropes and lovable characters full of balanced advantages and flaws, complex magical/psychic/super/ultratech systems with secrets to uncover and tricks and power-ups for the protagonist to discover, and worldbuilding full of deep hidden secrets with a shake-up every other book or so...
And really I'm at the point where regardless of how long his series go on (and they do go on and on and on), I think each one is good for about two or three books and then I'm out.
I like teens in space. I like YA space opera. Skyward was fun, Starsight expanded the universe, and Cytonic ups the stakes, levels up Spensa, our adorable hot mess of a teen girl starfighter pilot, explains the Big Bads... and ends with another To Be Continued that left me feeling profoundly unenthused.
So, Spensa has escaped her home, the human colony of Detritus, and is now a starfighter facing the Superiority, a galactic alliance that's currently trying to wage a genocidal war against humanity. Which would make them unambiguously the bad guys except, uh, it turns out humans have tried to conquer the galaxy three times, so they kind of have a point about humans being dangerous...
Rather than being about a galactic war, though, Cytonic is mostly about Spensa playing pirate. Literally, she's imprisoned on a prison world where everyone plays pirate, raiding each other and counting coup in "pirate clans," and engages in mock pirate battles and as soon as I heard "Pirate tournament" mentioned I groaned. Yeah, yeah, Spensa fights in the pirate tournament and makes friends and proves herself the baddest human starfighter around, and then she helps break out and some of her companions make heroic sacrifices and she learns about the sinister Delvers who are these eldritch alien things who seem to be behind a lot of the trouble.... and Spensa is a "Cytonic." Cytonics have specialties, though every Cytonic can theoretically learn every other Cytonic talent - stop me if you've heard this before. If you've ever read another Brandon Sanderson novel, you have.
Cytonic was fun but after three books this series has lost its charm for me, and knowing Sanderson he can easily go on for another four, plus a secondary series and a prequel and a side story or two.
I also felt like the quality was not as great. It was almost like Brandon Sanderson is writing Brandon Sanderson fanfiction. (In his author's afterword, he cites dozens of beta-readers, and a bunch of "gamma readers," who are apparently volunteer proofreaders.)
I will look at whatever Sanderson comes up with next, but having already kind of burned out on The Stormlight Archive, the next Skyward book will have to promise some kind of resolution if I'm going to read it.
Also by Brandon Sanderson: My reviews of Elantris, The Mistborn trilogy (Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages), The Alloy of Law, Steelheart, The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Warbreaker, Skyward, Starsight.
My complete list of book reviews.
Delacorte Press, 2021, 415 pages
From the number one New York Times best-selling author of the Reckoners series, the Mistborn trilogy, and the Stormlight Archive comes the third book in an epic series about a girl who will travel beyond the stars to save the world she loves from destruction.
Spensa’s life as a Defiant Defense Force pilot has been far from ordinary. She proved herself one of the best starfighters in the human enclave of Detritus, and she saved her people from extermination at the hands of the Krell - the enigmatic alien species that has been holding them captive for decades. What’s more, she traveled light-years from home as an undercover spy to infiltrate the Superiority, where she learned of the galaxy beyond her small, desolate planet home.
Now, the Superiority - the governing galactic alliance bent on dominating all human life - has started a galaxy-wide war. And Spensa’s seen the weapons they plan to use to end it: the Delvers. Ancient, mysterious alien forces that can wipe out entire planetary systems in an instant. Spensa knows that no matter how many pilots the DDF has, there is no defeating this predator.
Except that Spensa is Cytonic. She faced down a Delver and saw something eerily familiar about it. And maybe, if she’s able to figure out what she is, she could be more than just another pilot in this unfolding war. She could save the galaxy.
The only way she can discover what she really is, though, is to leave behind all she knows and enter the Nowhere. A place from which few ever return.
To have courage means facing fear. And this mission is terrifying.
Brandon Sanderson, you exasperate me at times.
I complain about the guy an awful lot considering how often I read his books. I mean, he's reliably entertaining. His writing hits all the pleasure centers of the nerd brain without ever really challenging you. Superheroes! Epic fantasy! Space opera! He can write it all, and he will write with familiar, well-worn tropes and lovable characters full of balanced advantages and flaws, complex magical/psychic/super/ultratech systems with secrets to uncover and tricks and power-ups for the protagonist to discover, and worldbuilding full of deep hidden secrets with a shake-up every other book or so...
And really I'm at the point where regardless of how long his series go on (and they do go on and on and on), I think each one is good for about two or three books and then I'm out.
I like teens in space. I like YA space opera. Skyward was fun, Starsight expanded the universe, and Cytonic ups the stakes, levels up Spensa, our adorable hot mess of a teen girl starfighter pilot, explains the Big Bads... and ends with another To Be Continued that left me feeling profoundly unenthused.
So, Spensa has escaped her home, the human colony of Detritus, and is now a starfighter facing the Superiority, a galactic alliance that's currently trying to wage a genocidal war against humanity. Which would make them unambiguously the bad guys except, uh, it turns out humans have tried to conquer the galaxy three times, so they kind of have a point about humans being dangerous...
Rather than being about a galactic war, though, Cytonic is mostly about Spensa playing pirate. Literally, she's imprisoned on a prison world where everyone plays pirate, raiding each other and counting coup in "pirate clans," and engages in mock pirate battles and as soon as I heard "Pirate tournament" mentioned I groaned. Yeah, yeah, Spensa fights in the pirate tournament and makes friends and proves herself the baddest human starfighter around, and then she helps break out and some of her companions make heroic sacrifices and she learns about the sinister Delvers who are these eldritch alien things who seem to be behind a lot of the trouble.... and Spensa is a "Cytonic." Cytonics have specialties, though every Cytonic can theoretically learn every other Cytonic talent - stop me if you've heard this before. If you've ever read another Brandon Sanderson novel, you have.
Cytonic was fun but after three books this series has lost its charm for me, and knowing Sanderson he can easily go on for another four, plus a secondary series and a prequel and a side story or two.
I also felt like the quality was not as great. It was almost like Brandon Sanderson is writing Brandon Sanderson fanfiction. (In his author's afterword, he cites dozens of beta-readers, and a bunch of "gamma readers," who are apparently volunteer proofreaders.)
I will look at whatever Sanderson comes up with next, but having already kind of burned out on The Stormlight Archive, the next Skyward book will have to promise some kind of resolution if I'm going to read it.
Also by Brandon Sanderson: My reviews of Elantris, The Mistborn trilogy (Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages), The Alloy of Law, Steelheart, The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Warbreaker, Skyward, Starsight.
My complete list of book reviews.
