WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED HERE?Andreas Eschbach’s ‘The Carpet Makers’ impressed the hell out of me. I’ve been going around for a few years now, recommending it to all and sundry. I was wildly excited that he had a new book coming out in English, and bought it the very first time I saw it up for sale. I even recommended it to others before reading it myself. I hereby rescind that recommendation.I would never in a thousand years have guessed that this book was by the same author. There’s no similarit...

If this is typical German sci-fi the German sci-fi is doing very well. It took me a while to get this book and I see from other reviews that some people don't like it. It starts out in one place and then becomes something completely different and repeats that trick a few times. For some time I had no idea where the author was going with this but then the end packs a really great punch and I didn't see it coming. The story throws around many interesting ideas and looks at them closely, even weave...

Sooo bad. One of the worst wanna-be sci-fi books I have ever read. The story is so boring and long, the "surprises" are so trivial and predictable, and most of all, the figures are so repulsive and stereotypical. It was literally a torture to read the whole thing, which I only did so that I can now make a qualified judgement: the whole thing is terrible, does not make sense, is badly written and has ugly characters. Sorry.

this review refers to the audiobook version.i think the title is missing a punctuation mark: Lord, Of All Things.i'm going to go on a bit in this review, and be SUPER-SPOILERY. consider yourself warned.......still with me? ok let's go.is this the Andreas Eschbach who wrote The Carpet Makers? really? the same guy, not his evil twin? cause i adore The Carpet Makers. it rocks on so many levels, from its construction to its conclusions. but Lord of All Things... lordy, lordy, lordy.let me get the go...

An interesting premiseI liked this book quite a bit, although it's a bit difficult to pin down why. It seemed to have a lot of extraneous stuff, and went on for longer than I would have liked, but the ideas proposed are quite fascinating.

Usually I don't actually write reviews, but this one pissed me off. It started off well. But then it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.The good:it was slightly intriguing. Had a good intro. Felt authentic with all the technical language. The bad: Hiroshi and Charlotte - neither were likable. Both made stupid decisions the entire time. Hiroshi's end - nothing, absolutely nothing at all- in his character made his end believable. It was random and silly.Charlotte's power - nothing was

I do not have a recent recollection of reading a book worse than this and I'm completely baffled as to why the germans awarded this young-adult wannabe saga with so many prizes."Lord of All Things" hits, one by one, in an amateurish frenzy, all the major faux-pas an author can make: "thought verb" abuse, boring walls of text that are never unpacked in credible dialogue, over explanations of ideas, weak character development, ridiculous female characters that hit all the male gender stereotypes,

This is an extraordinary book unlike any I have read. The plot and characters are fascinating. I would call this a techno-suspense/thriller. I suggest you read the book description because it defies any words I can think of to explain it. It is one of those once every few years great reads that, for me at least, I will remember for a long long time.

Listened to this as an audio book, really loved it!

What a book! Though it is 'proper' SF, Lord of All Things includes strong elements of a thriller, a romance and even a light sprinkling of horror and fantasy. The grand scope also applies to the story itself with goes from a child's dream to earth-shattering events; the scenery covers Japan, New England, the Russian Arctic, the American West, Argentina and even outer space while (the body of) the book covers about 40 years. The German author (the translation is very good btw) handles the charact...

Overall Satisfaction: ★Intellectual Satisfaction: ★Emotional Satisfaction: ★Bechdel Test: PassJohnson Test: PassWill I read more by this author? Maybe. Definitely not with this translator.I loved Andreas Eschbach’s previous novel, The Carpet Makers, currently his only other novel translated into English. It was very much an idea-driven science fiction novel, old-fashioned in a very good way, fitting nicely in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov. And the translation...

I'm not even sure how I got this book in the first place, but it was on my Kindle, so I read it. And am I ever glad I did. It was fantastic. The book is ostensibly a science-fiction book and it certainly has a lot of the classic elements of good sci-fii. But more importantly, this is a book about well developed characters, which are my favorite kind. I won't give away the details of the book, but it involves multiple characters with their own story lines that all interact over the course of deca...

It starts in Tokyo with Hiroshi, the son of a laundress, and Charlotte, the daughter of the French ambassador.He watches her standing in her garden looking up at the sky with her nightgown, when it's all rainy, and he's fascinated by her.Later, he sees her throwing away a bag. That bag had a doll and Hiroshi took it and fixed it and brought it back to her. Each of them has a special capability we see in the beginning of the book;This is a sci fi book, but Charlotte has a bit of fantasy, where sh...

reviews.metaphorosis.com 3.5 starsA focused young boy and a girl with a strange power meet early in life, and continue to cross paths as they learn secrets of the Earth's past. I ran across a translation of Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers some years back, and thought it excellent - original, interesting, and well told. When I found Lord of All Things for sale, I jumped on it, forgetting even to check for a version in the original German. Though Lord of All Thingslacks the creativity of T...

Eschbach's Lord of All Things is a weave of nearly every major genre you could search out--though a science fiction novel at heart (at least by the end), it includes elements of romance, mystery, drama, horror, suspense, adventure, and even some small element of the supernatural. Probably, the book will lose some readers exactly because of this variety, but for many readers, I think it is exactly this variety that makes the book so impossible to walk away from. Perhaps because I read so little s...

This is a wonderful book. It really surprised me, since I didn't expected for it to have such a variety of subjects going on.The plot twists are very well thought by the author, and the characters are very appealing as well.It's a great story to read about, and think about many questions that are raised about our existence as a species.

This is a difficult book to recommend. The ratings on Goodreads vacillate between 1-2 stars and 4-5 stars. Either you love it or you hate it. I'm going to go right down the middle. I didn't love it, but nor did I hate it, and I can see why readers on either side of the scale feel the way they do about it.The prologue offers an enticing hook: A young boy, Hiroshi, the son of a cleaning lady, promises his new friend Charlotte, the daughter of the French ambassador, that he will change the world by...

The book is oddly compelling and eventually straight up compelling. Sadly it squanders too much of its potential and too many of its amazing ideas.Throughout the book the author comes up with and introduces (too many) interesting concepts from nanotechnology to seeing into the past. This makes the book a worthwhile pick up. The downside is Eschbach seemed more intent on introducing more concepts than following through on the ones already introduced. The result is that most just seemed to be forg...

This has the worst ending of any book I've ever read. All through the book, characters are developed and put in place to combine for an exciting story, but before any of those characters really get going, the book suddenly ends. It's like the author had the book 60% written when the publisher suddenly said "Give me the final version today or it doesn't get published", then the author got mad and slapped on a sarcastically bad ending.That said, before I knew what I was in for with the ending, the...

Overall I enjoyed it. The story took some interesting turns along the way and touched on some poignant reflections on human nature.On the other hand, it leaned on sci-fi tropes a little too much and had some serious issues with how it treated gender and sexuality. The parts about James were flat-out disgusting, and if they were somehow important to the central plot I must have missed how. It was an okay book with flashes of brilliance but I wouldn't enthusiastically recommend it.