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Two stars for me means "I pushed through and finished it."

I haven't read any David Brin before, so all I knew was that he existed and that he had a series of books in his Uplift universe, which this wasn't part of.

This feels like a book in two parts: the first three quarters, full of detailed worldbuilding and a great deal of prose that turned out to be irrelevant, and the last quarter, featuring main characters that were only part of the ensemble cast in the first part, and a nemesis which was only mentioned in the barest of ways until then. I estimate that of that first three quarters, two thirds of it could have been safely edited out to make a lean 440-page novel with a coherent message.

Stylistically, Brin is pretty mediocre at writing women, so it's fortunate that there aren't many in this book. His writing of autistic characters is similarly stereotyped and awkward.

Based on Existence, I'm not rushing out to read the Uplift series.

The blurb on the back of this book says that it’s a standalone story in the same universe as Fenn’s first book, Principles of Angels, which I haven’t read. That claim is probably a bit of a stretch because I feel like I’ve been dealt plot spoilers on the first book now.

This novel begins as a straight fantasy in a village in a land that draws heavily on Middle-Ages Celtic culture. As world-building, it’s fine and detailed, but not my cup of tea, and it felt slow and drawn out. Fortunately the trope gets subverted about halfway through the book as it pivots—quite suddenly—to a science fiction adventure.

The reliance on Celtic legend, not something I’m very familiar with, left me confused at times, and it might have led to my feeling that the climax had an element of deus ex machina. A bit of earlier application of Chekhov’s Gun might have prevented that.

Apparently there are five books in the series. Will I hunt down the others? Probably not.

Golly, this book is a brain-burner, but it was the first time I really understood semiconductors. And I include the Electronics subject I did at university in that.

This textbook starts from the basics of passive components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) and by chapter 3 transistors have been covered. From there it's on to signal processing, amplification, rectification, and, inevitably digital circuits (which are, to me, less interesting).

A critical thing I noticed is that the stereotypical rookie-advanced circuit, the astable multivibrator, isn't in this book at all. There's a digital implementation with chained flip-flops, but the version with two transistors criss-crossed is nowhere to be seen. This comforts me, because the multivibrator just isn't as important in the real world as everyone makes out, and it's actually super-hard to understand.

Because it's a textbook, it has broad coverage of so many topics and it doesn't always delve into every corner of electronics. Its intent is to get you up to speed with circuit design, but it'll take a few rereadings before I think I'll get even close to that.

The dry humour of the authors is noted and appreciated. I may post some choice quotations here in the future.