This is Pacific Rim but with Chinese mythology and some basal feminist ideas mixed in. This is to say it's awesome and I love it. Iron Widow is an easy, fun read that never strays from its convictions. It's a revenge story. Zetian is seeking vengeance and we follow her.

I finished this in a day and was fully absorbed the entire time. Xiran Jay Zhao knows what they're about!! The clear contrasts between historical Chinese cultural practices, like foot binding and Confucianist family structuring, and the massive robots run by life forces, or qí, make this novel an interesting ride. This book pulls no punches.

That said, I have a few issues with the tonal changes throughout. If you want a singular angry book exclusively about female rage, this is not it. If you want romantasy, this is also not it. There are a few swings between Zetian's deep seated anger and her heavy sense of empathy that make for some interesting characterizations, but I do wish some of it was taken farther.

It would have been cool to see how Gao Qin, media mogul, moves outside of his relationships with Gao Yizhi and Wu Zetian. I hope the sequel will have more of the nomadic tribes that live outside of the Great Wall.

Zetian's foot binding was generally unexplained and used as a point of subjugation, but we never got an instance of how that decision, made for her by her grandmother, was ever helpful for social climbing (lotus feet/bound feet were used to signal higher class and social status in China before the practice was deemed cruel in the mid 20th century). Zetian wasn't born wealthy, so were her feet broken for no reason at all? The cruelty of her disability is only amplified by its acceptance, and we only see her personal reaction to it, not the points of view of others who may condone this misogynistic practice.

The end opens up a lot of general questions, and there are a few things throughout the narrative that go unanswered, like the significance of Yizhi's tattoos. Some of the choices the main characters make are downright cruel, and I don't know if the way they were treated versus how they are portrayed (flawed but with the capacity for kindness) can be reconciled with some of their shocking decisions. I do wish there were some chapters from other points of view, or that not everything is told directly from Zetian's first-person perspective. It would give the reader a chance to see events without Zetian's sometimes hateful point of view (which hey I understand that is kind of the point of the book being about her personal vendetta against everyone who has ever wronged her).

These are all questions and minor issues though. Overall, it's a great book! If I read it as a teen, I would have devoured it and then the second book easily. Zhao delves into heavy topics and difficult moral dilemmas with an easy literary grace accessible for all ages. I'm excited to read the sequel, and any more of their Iron Widow series as they come out!

Snow Crash is a book that generally knows what it is. It has a vague idea of its plot points, and is so close to pinning down what characters want and why, but always forgoes their personal motivations or desires or history with one another in favor of serving the larger plot. Which is... I'm not sure, actually. There are a lot of wealthy men involved in the political realm of this world, and they all seem to be of a similar flavor. We don't know what they want or why, and we never find out. The end is fully dislocated from the rest of the book, which is told almost exclusively from Hiro and Y.T.'s points of view.

The wealthy people are sort of morally grey, but many are portrayed as genuinely good with a complex background, which doesn't make much sense if they're hoarding enough wealth to establish their own miniature countries within the American landscape.

Overall, this novel is a slog to get through. I can appreciate the interesting character designs (Raven's and Hiro's appearances are reminiscent of men out of time) and the world-building Stephenson does. The concept of a good chunk of America being run by a postmodern Mafia with a half-assed pizza chain front is interesting! The snow crash drug is interesting! The Rat Things are interesting! But Snow Crash never twists any deeper into this world. The aesthetics of America as a dilapidated neon strip mall overtake a garbled message about control, religion, and drug use.

Unfortunately, this book is not a fully realized entity, and that's disappointing considering the fervor around its relation to the real life Metaverse. A surface-level parallel drawn between a 1992 speculative fiction novel and the very real creation of a team of marketers working under a multi billionaire is not enough to condemn or exonerate Zuckerberg's intellectual property in any real way. It is however very funny that Facebook developers drew from a fictitious and virtually immersive global network used by the technological elite to basically make Nintendo's mii plaza but worse.

Overall 2.5-3 stars, can't rate this book any higher than that. A good concept doesn't mean it's automatically gonna be a great story.