Reviews and Comments

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.

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.

Indulgent, at times brilliant but mostly just messy and unsatisfying story with an interesting protagonist that it then ends up wasting on a convoluted mess of a plot. Where I thought Chainsaw was going turned out to be more interesting than where it actually was going.

(Also: I found the endless references annoying. Yes, we've seen all the 80s slashers, yes, we all love them, but just referencing them is not paying homage to them, it's just ... name-dropping.)

This is probably someone's favourite book of the year. It's not mine - it's pretty far from the kind of stuff I usually love - and I was still really impressed and moved.

A love story with a backdrop of a paradimensional war, with the focus on beautiful writing and all the worldbuilding strictly as an afterthought. This is a novel that knows exactly what it wants to be and succeeds in that admirably. There's nothing superfluous here, only beautiful prose and a story that cannot but end tragically. Maybe.