this book took aaaages
to read. Goddammit.
Blue Remembered Earth is a book written by Alistair Reynolds, who is known for his hard science fiction and space opera. I’d read a couple of short stories of him before, but I’d never bought any of his books before, and this one looked pretty.
The story is about a brother and sister, about 150 years into the future. Space travel has become a normality, and everyone has machines in their heads that allows them to ‘ching’ by which the author means that you can mentally control a robot or other human whilst you mentally leave your body. The mechanism also stops you from harming others, and basically knows everything about you, and your health, unless you’re far from civilisation.
The siblings come from a fairly important family, all thanks to their grandmother. She dies in the beginning of the story, but soon after they discover that she left something in a volt on the moon. No biggie: the brother will travel there, take a look at the volt, and maybe visit her sister too, who lives there and tries to make a living as an artist. Unluckily for them, it appears that their grandmother is taking them on a wild clue hunt that will force them to make unsure new alliances and put their family against them as they travel between moons and planets in our solar system, slowly realising how huge it is, but also how terribly tiny.
It took me more than a month to read this book, mostly because Alistair Reynolds builds his stories up at a snail pace. Things only started getting interesting at page 200; and once they are, Reynolds has the annoying habit of leaving a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, which, granted, works, but feels cheap after a while. But a definite plus is how realistic it all is; the long descriptions of how everything works all seem to be extrapolated from today’s physics and thereby entirely plausible.
All in all the book was reasonably good, even though the characters could have used a dab more emotions ever now and again.
Not entirely sure to whom I should recommend this.
Until next time,
Bejoes
Blue Remembered Earth is a book written by Alistair Reynolds, who is known for his hard science fiction and space opera. I’d read a couple of short stories of him before, but I’d never bought any of his books before, and this one looked pretty.
The story is about a brother and sister, about 150 years into the future. Space travel has become a normality, and everyone has machines in their heads that allows them to ‘ching’ by which the author means that you can mentally control a robot or other human whilst you mentally leave your body. The mechanism also stops you from harming others, and basically knows everything about you, and your health, unless you’re far from civilisation.
The siblings come from a fairly important family, all thanks to their grandmother. She dies in the beginning of the story, but soon after they discover that she left something in a volt on the moon. No biggie: the brother will travel there, take a look at the volt, and maybe visit her sister too, who lives there and tries to make a living as an artist. Unluckily for them, it appears that their grandmother is taking them on a wild clue hunt that will force them to make unsure new alliances and put their family against them as they travel between moons and planets in our solar system, slowly realising how huge it is, but also how terribly tiny.
It took me more than a month to read this book, mostly because Alistair Reynolds builds his stories up at a snail pace. Things only started getting interesting at page 200; and once they are, Reynolds has the annoying habit of leaving a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, which, granted, works, but feels cheap after a while. But a definite plus is how realistic it all is; the long descriptions of how everything works all seem to be extrapolated from today’s physics and thereby entirely plausible.
All in all the book was reasonably good, even though the characters could have used a dab more emotions ever now and again.
Not entirely sure to whom I should recommend this.
Until next time,
Bejoes
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