Harrow the Ninth expands events into a larger scale without lessening the interpersonal frictions, and I cannot explain how the book does it while being partially presented in the second person <spoiler> Kinda </spoiler>. It does second person voice so well that I eventually smoothed over the structure in my brain, not even clocking it as anything other than standard writing format, until the structure itself turned out to be part and parcel to the twisting reveal of the novel.
Read MoreI’ll cut to the chase—I didn’t like this book very much. I think the author is incredibly talented and like a lot of his more recent novels, but this one kept missing for me. It is cited with reverence by a certain class of aging computer-savvy hacker-adjacents, but for a “beloved classic of the genre,” it sure is heavy with casual slurs and a real woof moment with its 15-year-old-girl-has-sex-with-adult-man plot point. I’m not sure how the extreme satire doesn’t dent the image of Snow Crash’s Metaverse as prescient holy text in a world before google parent-company Alphabet based their whole pitch deck on Hiro’s gargoyle-lite always-online surveillance gear, but here we are.
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