The Tainted Cup

[psocoptera]

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett, 2024 novel, first of a trilogy. A young apprentice investigator with total recall like Simon Illyan, only these abilities are granted via Witcher-like potions (apparently even giving some people the white hair and yellow eyes), gets involved in a murder case in an empire threatened by kaiju and maybe also the manipulations of the Cetagandan-haut-like gentry. Which is to say that if an author admits to being an LLM user, even if he claims he isn't using it for his creative writing, I cannot help but start playing the "which parts of this seem borrowed" game. In all fairness it was a good book, fun, fast read, the mystery seemed to hang together as far as I noticed and I enjoyed the plant-tech worldbuilding. I'll probably read the other two. (I wasn't into Foundryside, but I liked the City-of books, so he is neither a definitely-read or definitely-don't-read author for me at this point.) And I'm actually all in favor of creative recombining/repurposing/riffing! If there's, like, a person doing it. I don't want to think I'm reading a book if I'm actually reading extruded text product though.

Comments

[ruthling]

While I enjoyed Tainted Cup I was disappointed because I expected more from RJB. Didn't know he uses LLM, but maybe that makes sense.