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.
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.)
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange …
Review of 'This Is How You Lose the Time War' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
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.
