WELCOME
Dear Readers, Aliens and Creatures this is – The All-Consuming World – Initially, I was so confused… and not good confused… just confused… but then, I got accustomed to being confused and it all got better. 🤣
BASICS
Official title: The All-Consuming World
My title: It’s Okay to be a Raging Maniac of the Cosmos
Author: Cassandra Khaw
Publisher: Erewhon
Fav character: Ex-Audra
Type: Book
4.7/5
INTRO
Space, clones, bots and ghosts… 💁 because, why not?! A final mission we don’t fully understand until the last 60 or so pages of the book. Lots of cursing, screaming, shooting and condescending a**holes. Sexless unrequited love and desire is everywhere and you may need access to a dictionary (which I adooooore). 😍
REVIEW
Pretty Ayane, Mad Maya, Puppet master Rita, Special Dead Johanna, Cagy Elise, Super Audra and Staid Constance, were part of the Dirty Dozen; badass females who made the galaxies quiver, the roaming Minds groan and complain, and the Conversation buzz incessantly. That was 40 years ago… before one of them died-died, before another ended up uploading themselves into the conversation like a persistent parasite and before another settled down with a wife and child.
Forty years ago, the 11 marched to the tune of Rita. Rita, who insisted they kill each other repeatedly to ‘bond’; Rita, who used Maya to violently keep everyone in check; Rita, who didn’t try to save the two who died… now, Rita, is sending her rabid dog Maya, knocking. She is pulling the girls who have survived back together for a mission which may mean the end of them all. A mission that is only clear to Rita, the psychopath.
The two-hundred year old clone refuses and criminals come respectables will fight, claw and bludgeon their way to the edge of space after resisting the deadly pull of Rita. They will lose limbs, have their existence questioned by vastness and be pursued by the most dangerous beings in the universe… GIANT SENTIENT SPACESHIPS WITH WEAPONS… wtf Khaw?! 🤣
OBSERVATIONS
▪️DISCLAIMER: I was provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
▪️There aren’t that many characters, but there is a sense of vastness that takes up the space of other people. Things almost seem to occur in tiny pockets of this space… so that there isn’t a continuum, just one random incidence of flurried activity after another.
▪️Although there are to be about 12 Dirties, they mostly sound the same. Their cursing is similar, their reactions apart from mad dog Maya and robotic Rita, are essentially the same. Were they all to appear at once, it would be hard to know who is whom.
▪️The concept of age ships/ destroyer of planets, it’s difficult to grasp. I am unsure whether they are a mass of code, databases of histories and combinations of existent galactic knowledge, or giant planet-sized space ships. 🤔
▪️ The loyalty Maya has for Rita confuses me. There is mention of it being imbedded in her… but how?! Implant, DNA, …. just raging unrequited love?! HOW?!She knows and acknowledges alllll the myriad of ways it is defective… but she remains… I CANNOT understand.
Employment mandated neuroplasticity…
▪️ The book strangely enough expands on the idea of the ‘conversation’ (amalgamation of data and data analysis) mentioned in The Unraveling, but here only ageships and Minds, seem to have full access to it, unlike the partial access humans had in TU, albeit mediated through subsystems.
▪️Like – The Unraveling there are also clones, albeit used more as dough than as parallel bodies for a single mind.
CONCLUSION
A fun read for those who don’t mind lot’s of cursing, random people with temper issues, abstract concepts and nice juicy words. 😁
Pages: 444
Publisher: Erewhon
Year: 2021
