"A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones of a murdered crew …
Review of 'Six wakes' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I liked this one in theory more than in the execution. Even though the plot was clever and the characters were interesting, most of them also suffered from a serious case of assholery and weren't really called out on that. Also, I didn't quite buy the technology in combination with the society that was depicted, even though the tech itself was interesting enough.
As I'd been hoping, the second book had a faster pace, so I ended up liking it a lot more than the first. Superhuman spies, smart and capable yet politically slightly naive, is a delicious premise, and the story has some nasty turns that had me giggling. Not as relentlessly bleak as Wild Cards, yet by no means an optimistic romp where everything turns out okay for everyone, this was just the right story at the right time for me.
Everyone is an asshole. Also, everyone has taken on a new nom de guerre for some reason. In other words, this is classical Revelation Space science fiction that I'd hate and rate way down if the actual big sci-fi stuff wasn't incredibly imaginative.
Alastair Reynolds does ominous and big like no one in the business. It's just that everything related to characterisation rubs me the wrong way. When reading Elysium Fire I noted that the characters were maybe not as awful as earlier but the sense of wonder was missing. It seems like we can get one but not the other.
... but given the choice I'd still take the sense of wonder. So maybe I should just stop whining and enjoy the books.
His Revelation Space trilogy has some of the best ideas in hard science fiction. It's breathtaking in scope and ambition, and it keeps surprising me at every turn. After several re-reads I still find new, amazing stuff in it. It's big, it's impresive, it's incredibly imaginative. It also has horrible idiotic characterisation that makes some parts of it almost unreadable. Everyone is nasty, short-tempered, overly sensitive teenager, even when they're not supposed to be.
With the Prefect Dreyfus novels he seems to have matured somewhat. I no longer hate all the characters; they're not special, but they no longer make me want to stop reading, so I can focus on the story and imagination ... but at least with this novel, it's in short supply. Sure, Elysium Fire is a competently written high/hard sci-fi detective story, but it does not fill me with awe the …
Strange writer, this Alastair Reynolds.
His Revelation Space trilogy has some of the best ideas in hard science fiction. It's breathtaking in scope and ambition, and it keeps surprising me at every turn. After several re-reads I still find new, amazing stuff in it. It's big, it's impresive, it's incredibly imaginative. It also has horrible idiotic characterisation that makes some parts of it almost unreadable. Everyone is nasty, short-tempered, overly sensitive teenager, even when they're not supposed to be.
With the Prefect Dreyfus novels he seems to have matured somewhat. I no longer hate all the characters; they're not special, but they no longer make me want to stop reading, so I can focus on the story and imagination ... but at least with this novel, it's in short supply. Sure, Elysium Fire is a competently written high/hard sci-fi detective story, but it does not fill me with awe the way, say, Redemption Ark does. It's absolutely not bad, but it's just, kind of, there.
I find that I actually prefer a really original novel with a lot of weak spots to this all-around okay story. I don't know if I'm being harsh; Elysium Fire is not bad by any means. It's just that the special something I expect from Reynolds wasn't really present here.
A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find …
Review of 'Children of Time' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Half of this book was about average, the other half incredible -- so the total comes out to really rather good! Even the average story, about post-apocalyptic people looking for a new home, might have been worth reading, but what really grabbed my interest was the half of the story dealing with the birth of a spider civilization. No rubber forehead aliens here - the spiders felt really strange yet understandable. This was truly excellent and imaginative stuff with an ending I really loved.
