Not recommended
I read Mark Lawrence's "Prince of Thorns" based on Amazon recommendations and I am afraid it is not the thing I was looking for. I am willing to read grimdark, but this was just (as Liz Bourke puts it) "misogynist creepy" rather than cathartic. I was particularly puzzled by the large mutant who didn't seem to mind all that much that the protagonist wiped out all his friends and relations. Also this seems to be one entry in a trend in which grim fantasy futures are revealed to be postapocalyptic futures, which in this book just came across as lazy worldbuilding. You don't have to worry about anachronistic idioms if it's the future! (Except that you totally do.)
I also read the latest from Jack McDevitt, "Thunderbird", which is a sequel to "Ancient Shores". While the story has some of the discovery and sense of wonder writing that McDevitt can do well, his heart didn't really seem to be in it. Instead he wanted to tell the story of how people would react to alien technologies and other worlds. But he's not very good at it in this book. The arguments are just barely sketched out, and the conclusion feels like the author just got tired of writing rather than bringing matters to a conclusion. It might have been a stronger book had he abandoned the viewpoint characters involved in the exploration and spent more time on the core of the emotional story.book
I also read the latest from Jack McDevitt, "Thunderbird", which is a sequel to "Ancient Shores". While the story has some of the discovery and sense of wonder writing that McDevitt can do well, his heart didn't really seem to be in it. Instead he wanted to tell the story of how people would react to alien technologies and other worlds. But he's not very good at it in this book. The arguments are just barely sketched out, and the conclusion feels like the author just got tired of writing rather than bringing matters to a conclusion. It might have been a stronger book had he abandoned the viewpoint characters involved in the exploration and spent more time on the core of the emotional story.book