Not as good as the first one in the series, The Snow Queen. ( )

I don't quite understand the hate piled on this one. All the "waste of time" reviews.

Yes, this is a much smaller story than Snow Queen but it's still an important one, as it opens up the world that Vinge had kept locked down for so long.

No, Gundhalinu likely wouldn't have been my first choice to lead the sequel, but Vinge did a good job of rounding out his character and allowing him to dig into another mystery.

What I didn't like was the first third or so of the story. While it was a touch interesting, and set up what was to come, it largely felt like filler to bring a novella-sized story to the bare minimum for novel size. I won't go into what happens, but I think anyone who reads what they were originally going after, and what they found will agree, it was unnecessary, and didn't serve the second half of the book in any way. ( )

World's End is not as intricately plotted as The Snow Queen, and though it's much shorter, the plot drags more slowly in places. One character, Spadrin, seems to exist solely to annoy the reader for no reason at all for many pages. Finally, all comes neatly together in an exciting reveal, but the novella could have been half as long. (I wonder if this started as a short story that the publishers wanted to stretch to book length.) Looking forward to The Summer Queen and hoping it's more like The Snow Queen than World's End. ( )

Where The Snow Queen struck me as surprisingly contemporary (or maybe timeless), World's End did seemed stuck in the 1980s. Both the outdated approach to gender and sex and the actual prose were not to my tastes.

Beyond that issue, I also found much of the story to be a miserable slog, and the older I get the less interested I am in stories that are heavy on unrequited pining. The plot itself was pretty interesting, but all in all, I'm hoping the other two books in the series bear more in common with The Snow Queen than with World's End. ( )

World’s End is the second book in the Snow Queen Cycle. I enjoyed it quite a lot, although maybe not for the same reasons I had enjoyed The Snow Queen. It’s very different from the first book in both setting and style.

At half the length of the first book, this story is simpler and more focused. We follow one of the characters who had left Tiamat at the end of the previous book. (Character name only in the spoiler tags: BZ Gundhalinu.) He’s gone to another planet to muddle through his rather messed-up life. This planet has a location called “World’s End”, where people go off seeking treasure, but many never return. His brothers are missing after having gone in search of treasure themselves, and our main character goes off in search of them. Most of the book is told in the first person as the character recounts his adventures, with some framing chapters in the third person.

If you’ve read the first book, that description may make you wonder how it could possibly relate much to The Snow Queen at all. In many ways it just feels like a short, diversionary story about a pretty likeable character from that first book. However, there is a connection eventually, and it’s a big one that I expect to be very relevant to the next book.

The plot held my interest well and the pages in the book seemed to fly by. The first half is more of an adventure story, but things become increasingly more mysterious toward the second half. I did have some frustrations with the main character. I liked him quite a bit in the first book, but we didn’t really get to know him all that well in retrospect. In this book, I was often frustrated by how poorly he stood up for himself, and how gullible he was, sometimes falling for the world’s most obvious traps. I guess because he was an Inspector, I expected his training and experience to serve him better, but I started to feel like he really was rather incompetent. I liked his motives, especially toward the end, and some of his introspective thoughts, but I wanted him to be more competent. ( )