The hero, Jes, is on the run from The Institute: one of those sci-fi ‘we wish to study your special powers by torturing you in the name of progress’ jobbies. I think in the end I did find it a bit difficult to fully reconcile these shifts in tone and I wish there’d been a touch more consistency across the book in general, when it came to plot, pacing, and characterisation (the back cover copy led me to expect more ‘ganging up to take down the bad guy’ type action but in practice they decide to take out the bad guy at about the 80% mark and, uh, proceed to do that?) but there’s also a lot I sincerely appreciated here. And on the other dark as fuck: I mean we are talking, torture, non-consensual institutionalisation, experimentation on living subjects, racism/xenophobia, acephobia (internalised and otherwise), blackmail … and I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a bunch. Which is to say, the book is on the one hand a lightish-feeling romp about a young man who can read minds and control gravity running away to join the space circus. I was ultimately rather charmed by The Circus Infinite, although it’s also quite a paradoxical book-and it’s hard to entirely tease out which of those paradoxes are features and which are bugs. Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
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