Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps even exceeded my expectation
Review: This book cannot stand alone. One must first read "The Risen Empire" which is a 5 star book in and of itself. In the Killing of Worlds, Mr. Westerfeld carries the fast paced action further while showing greater depths and developments for his charecters. There are some unexpected twists and turns as the plot unfolds. Ample room is left perhaps for a third book. Afterall, Lauren is in space with two hostile ships near by and he may have become the nucleus of potential civil war!! Excellent and efficient story telling. Well done.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps even exceeded my expectation
Review: This book cannot stand alone. One must first read "The Risen Empire" which is a 5 star book in and of itself. In the Killing of Worlds, Mr. Westerfeld carries the fast paced action further while showing greater depths and developments for his charecters. There are some unexpected twists and turns as the plot unfolds. Ample room is left perhaps for a third book. Afterall, Lauren is in space with two hostile ships near by and he may have become the nucleus of potential civil war!! Excellent and efficient story telling. Well done.
Rating: 
Summary: First Rate Space Opera, about Immortality and AIs
Review: This is the sequel to Westerfeld's earlier novel The Risen Empire, and it completes the story. They are really one long novel, and should be considered together.I enjoyed the books a great deal. They are exciting, intelligent, and thought-provoking, with a pretty interesting political setup. As the book opens, the sister of the Emperor of the Eighty Worlds is being attacked, on a provincial world called Legis, by missiles from the Rix, and a team has been sent by the new Imperial warship Lynx to try to save her. The opening sequence, then, is a long and exciting battle scene, featuring some cool weaponry (such as the teleoperated, gnat-size, scout ships). Some explanation seems needed, and is slowly given us. The Eighty Worlds are one subset of the human-colonized Galaxy. They are ruled by the Emperor, who is immortal. The secret of immortality is controlled by the Emperor, who doles it out as a favor to political favorites, rich people, war heroes, and the like. The Emperor's sister is also called "the Reason", as it was apparently her illness that drove the Emperor to develop the immortality process, some 1600 years previously. The power of the immortal aristocracy means that the Eighty Worlds are somewhat technologically conservative, and for one thing they resist the development of AI's, which tend to form spontaneously once a planetwide network becomes big enough. The Rix are a fanatical cult of women, cyborgically enhanced, who believe the only purpose of humanity is to foster the development of these AIs, whom they worship as gods, more or less. The Rix resent the Eighty Worlds' position re AIs, and 80 years previously they fought a war, attempting to take over Imperial worlds to allow their networks to grow and form AIs. This new strike at the Emperor's sister seems an attempt at restarting the war, and indeed the Rix manage to push the Legis network to become self-aware, and it names itself Alexander. Any attempt to further explain the political and naval machinations that follow (and I started one) grows very complicated: better to read the book, I think. The story follows several characters. The main ones are Laurent Zai, a damaged war hero and the Captain of the Lynx; and his secret lover, Senator Nara Oxham, leader of the "pink" faction that opposes the rule of the immortals and the consequent social stagnation. Various other characters include a Rix commando who escapes the original battle and is recruited by Alexander to try to help him propagate; several other crewmembers of the Lynx, especially including the beautiful executive officer, Katherie Hobbes, who has fallen for Zai, having no idea that he is committed to Oxham; Jocim Marx, the Lynx's Master Pilot, who controls the teleoperated scouts in the various battles; Oxham's House, which shows signs of becoming an AI itself; and Rana Harter, a brain-damaged savant on Legis who is kidnapped by the Rix commando and falls in love with her. The action ends up concerning a dangerous Imperial Secret that the Emperor wants concealed especially from his own people, political maneuvering on the Imperial capitol world that might destroy Oxham's career -- or break apart the Empire; some desperate actions by the Rix commando to try to reconnect the planetary network to allow Alexander offplanet communication; and some exciting and intriguingly designed space battles, as Zai must fight off the Rix warship while trying to avoid the potentiality of orders to destroy Legis. And there are of course a few surprising developments. As I said, I really liked thse books. The tech is fascinating and well-imagined. The ideas, especially concerning immortality but also some other human modifications, are both SFnally cool and thematically engaging. I will say that the final revelation of the Emperor's Secret was a mild letdown, and it made some of what went before seem a little less important -- but perhaps I was simply asking too much. I still think this first-rate Space Opera, and considered as a unit, one of the best SF novels of 2003.
Rating:
Summary: Blame a "certain large bookstore chain" for the chop-job
Review: Westerfeld's website mentions that both books were intended as one, but a book chain balked at the 700-page length and demanded that it be cut in half (same thing that happened to Behemoth), to answer those criticizing the shortness of the two books.
Anyway, this is truly smart and savvy space-opera, and without any aliens peeking their tendrils around any airlocks, and recently this has been one of my favourite types of SF book - the kind that skips over aliens entirely, which is good because most writers do an awful job of making them into more than stereotypes of some aspect of human behaviour (i.e can't make them alien enough). Westerfled would probably do a good job if he tried, but the Rix are sufficiently removed from modern humanity to qualify, and the other tribe of humanity we get a glimpse of (the Plague Axis) are also very original and a concept that does make a certain amount of sense.
Having read Evolution's Darling first, I was surprised by the difference in these two books - a bit lighter but also much more fun and enjoyable, yet still with very dark elements. Definitely more mainstream than Evolution's Darling, and a better pair of books overall.
Westerfeld also knows how to write-up a good rip-roaring space battle between only two ships, and give some of the terminology used in the book (Spinward Reaches? Sandcasters?) I think he may have been a Traveler player in a previous life...
Overall, nothing bad to say about these books, other than the need to read them consecutively to really enjoy them. Here's hoping for a third.
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