HIGHLIGHTS
~It’s not ‘fellow clones’, it’s ‘sisters of another syringe’
~If you can shoot it, Maya will shoot it.
~If you can’t shoot it, she’ll shoot it anyway.
~Immortality doesn’t play nice
~AIs are dicks
~I will now read anything Khaw chooses to write

The All-Consuming World is a gemstone grenade of a book, and opening it up is the pulling of the pin; it explodes in your hands, all flashing jewelled shards cutting you to ribbons. Khaw’s prose is a deadly weapon, equal parts beautiful and brutal; the book they’ve written is every bit as hypnotic and dangerous as a siren with a machine gun. You can’t look away, you can’t stop, and you know it’s going to wreck you.

Why be beautiful when you can be seraphic instead?

The blurb for this one is fairly misleading; this really isn’t a heist story. Sure, it’s about getting the old team together for one last job, but the job is really not the focus – in the end we barely see it at all. The All-Consuming World is much more about the characters and their complicated dynamics than it is about anything else; it would be very easy to argue that there’s hardly any real plot – at least as we’re used to thinking of it – at all.

It’s just that that really doesn’t matter, because the book is un-put-downable regardless.

“You’re making a scene.”

“I can make some bodies instead if that helps.”

Maya is our more-or-less main character; the one in whose head we spend the most time. She’s a fist-full of broken glass, canines bared in a snarl, born with a gun in her hand (if not two), as deadly and dangerous to herself as she is to others. Fearless, reckless, rabid.

That’s why Maya is strutting into the bobbit worm’s jaws, with nothing but a ghost for backup, riding on a wing, a prayer, and enough combat know-how to win all four world wars.

I love Maya. I think it’s going to be hard for most readers not to love her. Because gods, is she broken, messed up to the core, and yet it’s not the kind of broken that is self-pitying or whining or any kind of grating. It’s a fierce brokenness, one that takes its shattered pieces and uses the shards as shivs, and Maya is just so compelling, so dazzling. She’s not a caricature or an empty archetype. She blazes. She is so absolutely not a tamed thing, and that is hypnotic even as you know that to touch her is to bleed.

a grin cocked like a loaded shotgun.

Maya used to belong to a mercenary group of clones who called themselves the Dirty Dozen; but most of the others went their own way long ago. Now it’s just Maya and Rita – Rita, the puppet-master, the tactician, the ruthless leader, who has messed with Maya’s biology to the point that Maya is literally addicted to her: serotonin rush when Maya follows orders, less-fun chemicals released when she doesn’t.

Rita served as their compass, a sun for murderers and no one else, lighting the road deeper into the country of sin.

They’re not romantically or sexually involved, but they come as a set. If Maya is the attack-dog, Rita is the master holding the leash.

But you can’t have a gun without a bullet, can’t take a shot without intent. Rita and her, they’re in this together. For good or for ill.

It’s a fucked-up, and therefore fundamentally interesting, dynamic. It’s horrible, it’s awful and painful and leaves the taste of copper in your mouth…it’s like a car-crash, a train-wreck, the kind of disaster you can’t look at and can’t look away from.

Until data corruption do they part.

As clones, Maya, Rita, and the rest of the ex-Dirty Dozen are functionally immortal – for a given definition of immortality. Their brain-maps, memories, and experiences are in some kind of cloud, some form of digital back-up, and if a body happens to die? No worries, just restore from the back-up into a brand-new meat-suit and you’re good to go! You can even make alterations to your next body, if you want, if there’s someone around to make the edits for you before you’re downloaded into your new brain.

But even with the back-ups, it’s still possible for things to go wrong. The reason the Dirty Dozen are getting the band back together is that Rita makes a revelatory proclamation: Elise, one of their crew who died badly, in such a way that there was no coming back…might have survived after all.

For a given definition of ‘survived’.

Rita claims that Johanna was uploaded into the Conversation – a kind of closed internet belonging to the Minds, the galactic community of AIs that exist in this far-future. Getting Elise back…is not going to be any kind of easy. Especially since the Minds have decided to hunt down not just the Dirty Dozen, but clones in general; and not just clones in general, but their families, and their originals, and the families of their originals.

That’s a lot of not-so-friendly fire to dodge.

Give her a gun, give her a war, give her bodies to line the floor.

If the part about Elise is even true. Nobody who isn’t chemically made to trusts Rita as far as they can throw her. But the possibility that it might be true is too much for the old gang to resist – because what if? – and so bit by bit, person by person, Maya and Rita draw them back into the fold. For one last big mission.

Hope the mind-killer.

I feel sorry for anyone who ends up reading this book in a physical format, because I would have had a hard time without the dictionary function on my e-reader: Khaw’s prose is wild and wonderful and it’s on you to keep up. I consider myself to have a larger-than-average vocabulary, and I was still asking the dictionary for word-meanings at least every other chapter. But I never felt like Khaw was trying to make me feel stupid. The words you’ve never heard before turn out to be perfect, to nail it, once you know what they mean – every piece clicks perfectly into place like a bullet into a chamber. It’s not pretentious, it’s musical, and the way Khaw uses language is pure magic – the old kind, the primal vicious bloody kind of magic. The All-Consuming World is fucking spellbinding, and a good chunk of that is the cast of fabulous queer persons – cis and nonbinary and genderfluid and all of them scintillating in their very different ways – but most of it?

Most of it is Khaw’s writing. The razor-sharp beauty of their prose. The flawless pacing, the sentence structure, the adjectives and images – it’s all perfect.

its cable looped around one iridescent arm like it is the snake from the Garden of Eve and Why-The-Fuck-Him-And-Not-Lilith

WHY THE FUCK HIM AND NOT LILITH INDEED

I want to call Khaw’s prose beautiful, but reading over all the parts of the book I highlighted, I’m not sure beautiful is exactly the right word. Maybe awesome, in the original sense (inspiring dread, terror, wonder, awe) and the modern one (fucking brilliant) is closer, better, more accurate. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Billy Martin, writing as Poppy Brite; Martin makes his horror novels so much more horrifying by using exquisitely beautiful prose, in essence seducing the reader into a sensual enjoyment of the terrible things that are happening – which is horrifying and sickening when you, the reader, realise it. Khaw’s writing feels similar: terrible things are happening, violent-vicious-awful things, but the scalpel-deft prose makes them beautiful, and described that way it sounds like there should be a dissonance, a contradiction for the reader. But there isn’t, because vicious-violent-awful and gorgeous-wonderful-decadent, the combination of the two, is the point. That’s how Maya views it all, which means the writing style? Isn’t jarring us out of the story; it’s pulling you deeper than should be possible into the main character’s mindset. It’s unbelievably clever, and it works.

That’s far from the only way in which Khaw uses language in insanely clever ways, though. There are very few writers who can create their own brand-new similes and metaphors, rather than relying on the tried-and-tested ones we all recognise – describing the moon as a pearl, for example – but Khaw is absolutely on fire with creation, connecting and comparing things I’d never think to put together, getting you in the gut or the heart will painfully perfect, genius imagery –

You could cut diamonds with her poise

Ayane looks like the last cold gulp of water before the sun goes supernova

a face like a veteran’s tall tale

And then there are the references; Judaic folklore, Greek myth, more I’m sure I didn’t catch all woven into the imagery, the metaphors. There’s the fact that every page roars with the queer-as-in-fuck-you! vibe. There’s the wordplay! There’s so many layers to it all, so many themes, and I cannot help but adore a book (an author) who doesn’t talk down to me, doesn’t slow down for me, expects me to be good enough to keep up. I liked having to look up what some of the words meant, okay? I’m weird like that.

I highlighted so many passages, folx. So many incredible turns of phrase, brilliant images, decadent description. I am in love with this book. I want to propose to it. I swear nearly every page made me swoon.

That is not to say that The All-Consuming World is without flaw. The abrupt ending in particular took me aback – I’m kind of hoping that there was at least one chapter missing from my ARC that will be present in the final copy, because it was like a missing frame in a film: jumping from point A to point G with the transition MIA. And although I personally don’t really care, I’m sure some readers aren’t going to be very happy that the whole book is build-up to a job that we barely see happen. There are a handful of lesser plotlines that kind of dissolve away into nothing without explanation or resolution, too.

But I honestly do not care. I’m here for Maya, for Viridion and Ayane and Constance and yes, because I love to hate her, even Rita too. And I am here for the prose that held me mesmerised from the first page to the last.

back when they were feral: hambering pejoratives, singing out curses, maenad-wild and gorgeous as a bullet flying true.

Before this, I had never read Khaw’s work before. They mostly write horror, and I am a total whimp about horror.

I don’t care. After reading The All-Consuming World, I will read anything Khaw writes.

Thank you to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

CW: Abusive Relationships, Co-Dependency, Body-Horror, Amputations, surgeries, suicide

So, this was a weird one. It was not at all what I was expecting. I mean I liked it but there where just elements that again and again confused me and made me like it less. I’ll give it 3.5 stars.

I was expecting a high stakes action adventure with a crew of badass mercenaries. And this is that, but only barely. The story focuses more on the characters and their trauma, where they have been in the last 40 years and who hates who. The ‘plot’ is resolved in the last 30 pages or so. That did annoy me a bit since I myself normally prefer plot over characters and this book didn’t give me that. As always, this is just my opinion, your experience might differ greatly.

And I liked the characters. They are cool and bad-ass and queer and even though none of them are entirely human their motivations and feelings are very understandable.

Ok, now to the stuff that I didn’t like. Like I already mentioned, I didn’t lime that the plot very much took a back seat in this, I think the synopsis is very misleading.

Next: (This has to come with the info that I read an ARC and these issues might be fixed in the final copy) There are so many mistakes in this. Typos and just wrong words and mixed-up names. I really hope that issue will be fixed because it makes the book even more confusing.

What do I mean with ‘even more’ confusing? Let’s just say the writing is…very elaborate. Iknow English is my second language, and I am always prepared to not understand everything in a Sci-Fi novel but even then… this writing is just way to complicated. In some sentences I can’t understand half of what is being said. And it’s not just the normal Sci-Fi level of that. The word choices just seem designed to show of and brag that ‘look, I used a fancy word!’. It just annoyed me. I think that might be because the author used to write short stories, where very stylized writing like this can add to the intrigue of the story but in my opinion, it doesn’t really work in a full-length novel.

So, in conclusion: If you want to read a story about badass sci-fi characters and don’t mind a little confusion, check this out!

I finish this book rather conflicted: it was fierce and bright and going out in a blaze of glory, and also really frustrating.

Cass Khaw borrows familiar tropes and has a hella lot of fun with them. The Dirty Dozen are the best there ever were; but half of them are permanently dead and the other half hate each other. Having a reluctant band of total badasses take on one last job to assuage old guilt and/or in hope of rescuing a former colleague is always a great place to start. Making them all women or nonbinary is my jam; because this is the sort of pulp action ride that is far too often - still! - centered on men even in futures where gender is the last thing that should matter to your clone cyborg crew. Here, the only men on page are some hapless fight club bois who get crushed in the opening chapter to establish Maya's badassery; a soft teenage boy who briefly appears as part of an exploration of what 'after' can look like; and a male-identifying AI. Brilliant. Swing that pendulum the other way; reflect historic erasures. Bonus points for the gender conversation in which two characters reveal they are nonbinary / genderfluid and confront their former leader for not allowing them that freedom with her heavily gendered vision for being one of the baddest bitches in the galaxy.

Add in a literal ghost in the machine and a narrator whose chemically-induced adoration/loyalty can't quite stop her recognising that her beloved is a ruthlessly manipulative sadist, and I should be all set.

And yet.

The All-Consuming World never quite came together for me. I adore Cass Khaw's artistry with words and I have a pretty generous vocabulary, but the prose was so dense with obscure terms even my e-reader gave up. I admire specificity, but when it comes at the cost of stopping the flow of reading to look things up, it's wearing - and it does no favours to what wanted to be a fast-paced torrent of rage narrative.

And as the plot peeled away secrets, it still never quite became clear to me what the final assault on Dimmuborgir was going to achieve. In fact, so much never came together for me, including the various factions of Minds and the ageships. In the end, I felt short-changed by both characters and world-building, with too much alluded to or breezed by and only so much that could be hand-waved away by the evocation of classic movies. When I paused for breath, the characters lost dimension and the world lost coherence.

The editing on my ARC was sketchy - typos, words missing, words repeated, words mis-used; the wrong character names used (the wrong character comes out as nonbinary) - which added to confusion along the way. This has not affected my rating, but I hope it was all caught before publication.

The world in this novel is incredibly creative, and really emphasizes the main question this story explores: What does it really mean to be alive? Is it your physical body, or your soul? This is seen in the fact that our main humans are clones, and if they die they can just regenerate themselves. AI ‘Minds’ have personality, mimic humans, and can make decisions to preserve their power. Humans can upload their consciousness to their version of the Internet, and can live forever, without their physical body. All of this sets the stage for an intriguing premise, which really makes the reader ponder these big questions.

Although this world is very immersive, it’s set with extravagant prose and interesting word choices. The amount of swearing in this book is astronomical; take this sentence as an example: "How the oil-gargling fuck are we supposed to figure out who the fucking fuck is going to try fucking with Verdigris?" If this bothers you, do *not* read this book. While the swearing didn’t bother me, the confusing word choices did - so much so that I felt like I was reading a book above my grade level (for perspective, I’m almost 30). I had no idea what was happening about 50% of the time, because I couldn’t even figure out what was going on with context clues like I normally can. This might have prevented me from continuing to read it, but at the same time, I really wanted to know how it ended and where the wild story was headed.

Contributing to the wild story was the outrageousness of some of the character’s personalities. The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that the main characters frequently referred to a physical body as “meat”, which led the reader to realize that they didn’t care about their physical bodies at all. In addition, the two main characters are in a relationship that screams of emotional manipulation and dependency, which leads the reader to really question them and their motivations. To add on to my mixed feelings on the characters, a love triangle showed up about two-thirds of the way through the book. This was a really weird choice, and I didn’t really care about any of them by this point. I even confused some of the minor characters; so much so that at the 97% mark I actually got two of them mixed up.

Part of the reason I didn’t put the book down was because I was intrigued by the premise and wanted to see how it would end. In a few different ways, the ending was not like I expected. First of all, the book ends just as our characters are headed into the big battle. The reader has no idea how their story actually turns out; this might have been on purpose, as it will lead the reader to contemplate the themes more than the plot points. The reader does get a good look at what was driving each of the characters, but some of those motivations turned out to be absolutely bananas. Essentially, the ending was just as weird as the rest of the book.

As I shut the book, I was not sure how I felt about it. I really wanted to rate this with a few question marks, because that seemed like the most accurate rating to give. The book was a good exploration of what makes us human, even with all of our flaws. However, it was littered with obstructive language and swearing, blocking any point the author was trying to make. In the end, I was left with the feeling of “what the fuck did I just read?”

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Erewhon for this eARC!

Unfortunately, I think this is going to be a DNF for me.

It is just too dense to comprehend, and though I can see the faint outline of a spectacular book, it's just so clogged and covered by this thick web of descriptive and overly-complex vocabulary that nothing is quite taking shape.

I've seen a lot of people on Goodreads experiencing the same difficulties with reading this book that I am, and I was hoping I might still be able to squeeze some enjoyment out of reading it, but alas, It's just not worth the continuous attempt to chug through this absolute mess of text.

Unfortunately I didn't care for this book. The worldbuilding consisted of a very strange writing style that made it very hard to read. I enjoy strong world building and I think a unique world with different dialects can work, but in this case it was too hard to comprehend and overshadowed the story.

The All-Consuming World is horror author Cassandra Khaw's full length novel debut. Khaw is known for their horror novellas, as well as their other short fiction and isn't exactly an unknown author, and I have run into their work a few times before, although never in a way that has made a big impact on me. Still many other writers I enjoy seemed to really like Khaw's work, so I was really excited to get a shot at their first full-length novel - even more so given that it wasn't explicitly horror, a genre that is kind of hit or miss for me.

And for the most part I found The All-Consuming World to be an incredibly well done sci-fi novel, featuring a queer cast of criminals brought back together by an abusive ringleader in a galaxy where humans are seemingly the lesser force compared to AI minds. And the plot is very well done as to its central protagonist, the foul mouthed armed muscle Maya, who finds herself unable to say no to the gang's abusive leader...despite all the bad she has done and the relationships Maya has lost as a result. Still while the characters and the relationships are done excellently, some of the prose and word choice didn't quite work for me, and the lack of explanations as to how this galaxy works may lose some readers. But by the last third of the book, I was all in, devouring it all to see how it would turn out.

Trigger Warning: Abusive Relationships - This book is essentially centered around an abusive relationship between the main character (and many of the side characters) and the team's leader, who manipulates the others to her own ends. If reading such a relationship is a problem for you, this book will not be for you.


-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Maya used to be part of the Dirty Dozen, a gang of criminal women, using their bodies and lives and more bodies - thanks to the miracles of cloning - to rile things up in a galaxy dominated no longer by humans, but by Minds fighting for control and data. Maya loved her comrades....and that love was reciprocated, but Maya loved Rita, their leader most of all. And when Rita's manipulations finally ended in disaster, with Johanna, one of their number, brutally sacrificed for good and another Elise, also dead, the group broke apart, and for the past 40 years it has just been Maya and Rita all alone.

But when Elise turns out to have somehow uploaded her mind into the ether, becoming a dangerous parasite to the detriment of the Minds, Rita tasks Maya with helping her get the group back together again....to get back Elise, or maybe instead to hand what's left of her over to perhaps the most treacherous Mind there is in exchange for access to the mysterious and legendary world of Dimmuborgir.

But the remaining members of the Dirty Dozen have gone out and formed their own new lives....and each has clear reasons not to trust Rita's manipulations for all the harm it caused them before. And as Maya goes out to recruit them all, she'll come to wonder what she lost with the team going away, and if helping Rita with this mission is really worth it all....assuming the Minds don't get her killed for good this time first.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gonna flip my review script a bit here and start with the bad here: I don't particularly love Khaw's prose and word choice. It's not just that this is a story little interested in explaining how things work (humans are an inferior class of being, AI minds are the dominant form even if they have different views on how to handle the galaxy, and humans can transfer their minds into clone bodies to stave off death, both due to long-life and physical damage, for example). It's how Khaw uses often longer words that just seem unnatural compared to shorter synonyms, like how one of her first lines is "Onwards she goes, Maya practically somnambulating down the narrow lanes." It didn't quite fully work for me, which helped prevent this from totally working, despite it all.

And so much of this works, despite that, and like I mentioned above the jump, I found myself tearing through the last third of this book on the train in the morning, when I usually find myself distracted from reading in tiredness instead. So much of that is because of the book's main protagonist, Maya, a woman who considers herself the hired muscle of her gang, the Dirty Dozen, even as the gang has disbanded. Maya had relationships with the other members, she had desires, and some of those desires were reciprocated in kind. Yet she subsumes her own self under her role as the "muscle", as if she doesn't matter, and uses her cyborg body's ability to tamper with her own internal body chemistry to reduce the amount she feels of these emotions at times. And even worse, she puts Rita above everything else, even knowing full well how much wrong Rita is doing, and how manipulative and cruel and monstrous she is.

And Rita is tremendously monstrous, as monstrous as any of the Minds could ever be. She tells, often through Maya, the various members of the dirty dozen different stories as to how she found out Elise was still somewhat "alive", and pushes all their buttons, without caring that they will eventually find out, because then Rita will have gotten what she wants. She's fully willing to use Maya as a living bomb to smoke out one such member, Ayane, and her control is such that at least two of the dirty dozen subsumed their own identities as non-binary or trans individuals under Rita's preferred idea of badass bitches. And as Maya recruits each of them once more for another abusive scheme, she realizes how away from Rita a few were able to have satisfying successful and happy lives, lives Maya couldn't have imagined or even understood (and a few instead chose death and couldn't make it - recovering from the abuse isn't quite that easy).

This character work of Maya over the course of the plot, as she and her fellow non-Rita members of the dirty dozen get back together, get put into a rock and a hard place as Rita's plans put them into the targets of not just the parasitic version of Elise, but also the dangerous AI minds, is absolutely tremendous, and it leads to a triumphant ending that makes it all mostly work. Do not expect, as you might from the name of the group the "Dirty Dozen" this to wind up being a full on heist novel, the story is more interested in using its interesting and out there setting to showcase the themes of abuse and the difficulty of getting out from under it (the Minds themselves show this, with one of their central concepts being that the word is "Obey").

Recommended, even if I had some issues with the prose. Will definitely be trying to pick up more of Khaw, because I can live with the prose if this is the result - wildly imaginative, with incredible characters handling a deadly serious theme.

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw was a roller coaster of a read for me. The book is about a group of women who were once part of a criminal group called The Dirty Dozen. They spent years together being able to reincarnate into cyborg bodies before their last mission went horribly wrong and the group disbanded. Years later they have to reunite to save one of their own and to return to the place where their last mission went wrong.

I really enjoyed the premise of this book and was looking forward to diving into the world that Cassandra Khaw built. The world building in this book is incredible and I felt completely immersed because of the descriptive writing style. I also enjoyed reading about this group of women and how their grief and anger has been handled in different ways and seeing all the messiness that comes when you have clashing personalities and agendas. I also really liked how diverse the characters are and always enjoy seeing POC and queer representation in any book.

At first, it was rather difficult for me to get into this book. The writing style is pretty intense and I did feel like it was getting bogged down by the amount of adjectives being used while it almost made me feel like I was reading a bunch of SAT words strung together when simpler terms could have conveyed the point across. After about 80 pages I did want to put the book down but I kept going and found myself enjoying the pacing and the writing style a lot better in the back half of the book. I know some people are going to enjoy the kind of over descriptive prose found in this novel but it didn't really work for me for most of this book.

Overall, I think Cassandra Khaw has written a very sumptuous books with the kind of science-fiction world building others can only dream of and filled it with characters that fascinating, infuriating, and realistic all at the same time.

I really wish I had positive things to say about this book, but I don’t. I DNF’ed the book at 18%, and I’m still not really sure what I read. The synopsis for the book sounded so cool, but the writing style is so odd and disjointed that it just doesn’t deliver on its promise. Half of the writing is very casual with plenty of swearing, and then you have a much more lyrical, almost pretentious use of big complicated words. I am positive the writer had a thesaurus open beside her while she was writing to find as many odd words as she could. I am a fairly intelligent person, and I have no problem with big words in a book, but it needs to make sense. As example, here are a choice few from ONE PAGE: finitude, tenuity, palimpsest, apocrypha, macramed, evanescent, ephemera. Now imagine an entire book like this.
I’m sorry but this book was just not for me.

No one writes like Cassandra Khaw.

They’re a whirlwind of talent and this is yet another testament to that.

The All-Consuming World is about an old group of friends/enemies/lovers are getting back together for one final hurrah in order to find their friend Elise and reach a fated planet of Dimmuborgir. Now, this story is a wild ride made only wilder by its vibrant cast of characters but the chapters seemed to read like short stories, leaving only an brief impression leading to only a surface-level insight. This wasn’t a huge problem but I just wanted to know that bit more about the world and it’s characters to be that more enveloped by it.

Maya is one of the most fun protagonists I’ve read in a while and I love her journey through the novel. Her relationship with Rita as well is something that’s absolutely fascinating and again, if there was just more of the book, I would have love to have seen a fuller exploration of that. Elise herself is perhaps the character we get to know most intimately and because of that , is the best by far out of the cast. She’s witty, she complex, and dead set on her goals making her chapters a real thrill to experience. Verdigris’ whole aesthetic and narrative about their gender expression is really well done but again, I just wanted that bit more with them to make me truly fall in love. Apart from those, however, the others suffered from a lack of screen time which made them feel underdeveloped which is a real shame because they all had a story to tell just needed that time to do so.

All in all, this is a fun read only too brief to make an impact on me. But the writing in this book is immaculate and that alone is enough to carry this story through to its conclusion. If you like cyberpunk, immaculate aesthetics, stories where everyone and anyone is queer, and writing that is above and beyond - this is the release of 2021 for you!

3.5 out of 5

I'm kind of surprised at just how little I have to say about a book by Cass Khaw, one of my favorite emerging voices of the last few years. It's a fine sci-fi tale, but I can't really muster up a whole lot of enthusiasm for it. This isn't to say that I disliked it, however. I just found it to be a perfectly serviceable, middle-of-the-road read.

Argh, I really try to enjoy sci-fi but I’ve never been a huge fan. I thought the book sounded interesting so I wanted to give it another go but the genre just doesn’t sit well with me. I think there is definitely readers that will enjoy the book. The story was intense. There is some trigger warning ps to be aware of

Content warning: gore, partner abuse, self-surgery, gun violence, death

A small fraction of a band of mercenaries called the Dirty Dozen get together for one last job which will hopefully bring closure to the disaster which tore the group apart several years ago. Rita leads, but it’s unclear if she can be trusted. Maya wants to, though everyone else seems to disagree. Meanwhile, an AI searches for the same planet and an epic clash is on the horizon.

Aesthetically and thematically science fictional with profane prose that pulls and prods the feelings, Cassandra Khaw’s debut novel is a queer treat.

I’m going to start this review with: if you do not like the “fuck” word, this will not be an enjoyable reading experience for you. This is especially prevalent in Maya’s POV sections. She’s angry, she’s grieving, she’s functionally immortal. Like a feral cat, you want to simultaneously take care of her and hope she gets her shit together. The prose is raw, varied, and hits on a level that suits the visceral details of the passage between death and life, the cyclical nature of these heavily-modified mercenaries’ existence.

Rita serves as a kind of antagonist. Though she presents the impetus for the gang getting back together, she sucks on such a thorough level. What is heart-breaking throughout is how no one can open Maya’s eyes to it. In addition to this compelling depiction of the dissolution of an abusive relationship, the way Khaw muses on immortality, aging, and maturity really resonated with me. There is one chapter where Maya meets with the partner of a former member of the Dirty Dozen, and there is a melancholic beauty to the finite years the two spent together. It works so well in contrast to the science fictional awesomeness that is the future tech. It’s thoughtful and a layer I wasn’t expecting given the other facets of the plot.

Come for the swearing mercenaries, big sequences, and slick sci-fi, stay for the feelings.

Unfortunately, I was unable to finish this book. I was really frustrated because the concepts the book is portraying are fascinating to me. The idea of a cloned worker class being chewed up and spit out by a capitalist machine that never lets your consciousness die is an amazing idea that I was excited to see explored. However, the prose was nearly impossible to get through.

I'd like to compare The All-Consuming World to This is How You Lose the Time War. Time War is another book about queer women living and fighting in a distant future rife with concepts and technology that the reader hardly has a way to conceptualize. The prose in Time War is also extremely thick to wade through, very purple, and often obtuse. But it works, because the writing in Time War is both beautiful and basically legible. Even if you don't understand all the references to pop culture and classic literature being made in time war, you basically understand what is happening on the page. Someone is chopping down a tree. Someone is making tea, Someone is writing a love letter. And even then the prose is thick, it is not so purple that you feel as if you're fighting your way through it. It's rather like a river's current sweeping you along instead, of a thicket you must hack through.

I take all this time to talk about Time War because I feel like The All-Consuming World is attempting to accomplish what Time War did, but unfortunately fails. The main problem I had with the prose in The All-Consuming World is the author's vocabulary. There is a strange mixture of the hyper vulgar side by side with the hyper esoteric that causes whiplash in the reader. I feel like there is a way to combine these two styles gracefully, but I did not feel that was the case here. For example, and I have seen other reviewers point this out, the word "f*ck" is used nine times in the first one and a half pages. I'm all for swearing in books, but any time a single word is repeated that frequently, there needs to be a very compelling reason for it. Otherwise, the repetition becomes grating. Unfortunately, I don't think there is any specific reason why "f*ck" is used as opposed to any of expletive or expression of discontent, and it does become grating very fast. But at other times, the prose becomes so pedantic that it feels as though the author is pulling SAT words like "somnambulating" from the thesaurus.

I will admit, though, there are also moments where the prose really does work. However, these tend to be short turns of phrase that capture my imagination, such as "cross her dollar store heart" or describing a laugh as "it arrives in a casket, a few little croaks escaping the lid." None of the sections I like lasted longer than a single sentence at a time.

On top of the style of the prose, I often felt lost as to which people, places, and actions I was supposed to be following in any given scene. The author often opts to describe vague concepts present in the world of the book, rather than focus on what was relevant to the scene taking place. I never felt grounded, and often wondered where exactly the character was or why she was fighting who she was fighting.

I do want to conclude by saying that I can absolutely understand why someone might love this book. I fought myself fighting against the prose, often lost in the vaguity of the world and frustrated by the author's vocabulary. But I love This is How You Lose the Time War, and I know plenty of readers were frustrated by the style of prose in that book as well. Ulimately the style of The All-Consuming World is very distinct, and may be just what certain readers need in order to feel completely enthralled and swept away by a novel. Ultimately, I hope this book finds the right audience for it. That audience just wasn't me.

Just could not get into book, even though I usually devour science fiction. The dialog and tone just did not grab my attention so I did not finish reading this book.

THE ALL-CONSUMING WORLD is a beautiful mess of broken people here to fuck shit up and probably die trying at least once or twice.

The world-building is marinated in sci-fi vibes and queer longing, generated though hyper-dense jargon alternated with declarations of laser-focused loyalty backed up by gore and plasma. It even takes the time to show a brief glimpse of how ordinary person would conduct life in this space, all without stopping the action. It's fragmented like a glass vase you drop on purpose while making smoldering eye contact with a nemesis you want to fuck. Most beautiful as it shatters but useless afterwards. Turns out the vase is Maya, and Rita is prepared to drop and rebuild her a hundred times to get what she wants.

There are several narrators who each have their own styles, it made them pretty easy to tell apart which was helpful when the story is revealed through the combination of their perspectives and they're apart for most of the book.

I loved Maya's meeting with Reha. It's this moment to breathe and contemplate, something it feels like Maya has never had the time nor space to do. The tone is distinct from the rest in the book in a way that complements the whole by being a different texture from the rest. It's such an important conversation for a character whose only mentor so far is Rita (who on her best days is indifferent and most of the time is actively manipulative). My favorite moment deals with the paradox that exiting a queer "girl power" space can be needed to figure out one's own queerness.

The prose is fantastic, densely syllabic, unafraid to pack in adjectives, to verb nouns and noun verbs. It makes language feel like a game, like the quickest way to the essence of a thought was to make the words scream and twist. This is especially fitting in a story filled with psychological manipulation and loyalty past reason. Anyone who spends their time loyal to Rita ends up needing twisted words just to keep track of their own thoughts. The main characters are complex and generally unlikeable, but fascinating and really great to read. Maya is a beautiful broken wreck of a person, managing to eke out a small piece of personal growth towards the very end when everything totally goes to shit.

CW for grief (graphic), cursing (graphic), emotional abuse (graphic), vomit, blood (graphic), gore (graphic), eye trauma, medical content (graphic), violence (graphic), gun violence (graphic), suicide (graphic), murder (graphic), major character death (graphic), death (graphic).

This book sounded perfect in summary, but in reading it, I didn't find anything to keep me invested in the book. The prose was so up and down because the author was constantly switching between a thesaurus lover's dream and the lowest of lowbrow speech. This juxtaposition didn't work at all. If you're going to have a cast of foul-mouthed characters, you just can't include every big word you've ever heard. As for the story, I couldn't remember what was happening page to page. The characters and the plot didn't grab me like I expected from a horror, sci-fi novel. I think this book could have used some better editing because there are definitely interesting thoughts here, but they needed someone to reign it all in.

My thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher Erewhon Books for an advanced copy of this science fiction novel.

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw throws you right into a universe that's dirty, messy, confusing and violent with characters who reflect this and also love to curse. Alot. Starting right with the first sentence to the book. Profanity doesn't bother me, but after awhile the cursing seems to be the only constant in this story. Since the idea is the Dirty Dozen doing one last job, I guess the language is supposed to reflect their dire circumstances and nihilism . After awhile it just reminded me of listening to a bunch of bond traders bragging about their trades or frat boys being frat boys.

The plot is interesting but I found unable to gel with the characters or with the story. I respect the representation, but no one stood out to me or made me care much about what had happened to them, or where the plot was going to take them.

By no means did I hate this book. I think I would like to read other works by the author, as I like the ideas and some of the writing was really really good. To me this was more of a cinematic work, rather than a novel. Even episodic television, I think would help me enjoy it more.

I really dislike pretentious and self-important novels, and this one was up there. It was also mixed voice in the sense that most of it was third person, but on occasion there was first person. I'm not a fan of mixed voice novels, and even less a fan of first person. I liked that the story hit the ground running, but there was a narrative and a dialogue that was not only obtuse, but was also larded with the kind of language that would make Deadpool blush. This is not a compliment, since I have no interest in reading either of these writers, but the novel is like the unfortunate bastard child of William Gibson and Bret Easton Ellis. I never liked Ellis. I used to like Gibson, but he quickly went downhill for me.

The story is futuristic cyber-punk, and it's one of these over-baked, aggressive books about tough-as-nails characters (in this case, female) who are so hardened and foul-mouthed that it's like a parody. I don't care about four-letter words here and there in a story, but this thing is so thickly-larded with them that it's hard to read. On top of that, the author seemed like she couldn't write a sentence without pulling out the thesaurus, so the text is dense and impenetrable in many places. I'm pretty well-educated, but this made for a really tough read, and not so much because the words were beyond my reading range, but because there was so much of this hyperbolic stuff that it really made it nightmarish to go through. How about this for a random sentence: "The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget." It's all like that, and it's too much - especially so for a novel in this genre.

The plot was simple, but it was all-but obliterated by the writing style. I ended up not so much reading it, as reading bits and skimming chunks. There was a team of female cyber-enhanced and cloned warrior women who had a sorry end to their last mission. Now some of them want to find out why it went so badly wrong and to figure out what happened to the team member who didn't die, but went missing. My problem with this premise is that this is a world where AI is advanced and in charge of everything and has little regard for humans. If this is the case, why are humans, slow of thought, and uninventive, sent to fight it? Why not robots? Why not hackers?

I thought of this particularly when the two characters from the first chapter, who are trying to persuade a resentful set of ex-team members to regroup, try to recruit the one who was their driver. Why do they have a human driver? Or pilot, or whatever she is? Even now we're having road vehicles enhanced by the use of computer-made decisions. Airplanes have had a lot of this technology for years. Now these people, purportedly in the future, want to take a backward step and have a slower-thinking human as their getaway driver? It made no sense and betrayed the whole world that the author had built. Naturally you want the human element in this, but these women really didn't feel human to me, and they weren't anyone I was interested in reading any more about. I didn't care about them, what they did, or what happened to them. But if you're going that route, you can write a better story about them and why they're needed instead of AIs. This story didn't do that.

The story of the girls was interleaved with another story, about this AI machine which was interested in working for a larger AI. I may be completely wrong about this, but it seemed obvious to me that this little AI was actually the missing team member who the others were searching for. Again, it didn't stir my interest, and if this is what turned out to the be case (I have no idea if it was), it was not interesting to me, since it had been telegraphed leaving no surprises. These assorted problems I perceived in the plot and the writing style were why I DNF'd this one. I can't commend it based on the fifty percent or so that I skimmed/read.

Review in 10 words: Difficult to follow plot, purple prose for days.

Synopsis:
A band of broken, down and out criminals reunite to try and figure out wtf happened in their last mission, which resulted in the death of one of their group members and to also rescue a missing comrade.

They're not the only ones on the hunt though. This story deep dives into the world of humans, half-humans, clones and AI and explores the connection between them.

My thoughts:

I really wanted to give this book a higher rating! The synopsis sounded so promising, it seemed gritty and super interesting.

In reality, I struggled to find anything in the story that kept my attention/kept me engaged. Most of the prose was super difficult to understand. Although, my vocab has definitely increased- lots of words I needed to look up to understand, so that was fun, but also annoying.

I didn't really connect with any of the characters, and I really wanted to care about them. The whole team is tortured and broken and imperfect, which was cool, but I don't feel like their relationships with another were that well executed. I feel like I knew a little bit about all of them, but not enough about any of them to care deeply.

The imagery was really cool at times, though I did get confused towards the halfway mark and that just kind of stuck around for the rest of the book... I wasn't exactly sure how things were happening, or what was even happening.

This is the first book I've read by the author. I did see in a few other reviews that fans of the author's work recommend reading anything but this one.