Ring by Stephen Baxter
Jan. 17th, 2008 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsHard SF. Very hard -- I think I might have chipped a tooth. Something is wrong with the sun, and all the stars around us are dying far before their time. A conscious virtual human is sent into Sol to investigate, while an unlikely crew sets out to travel five million years into the future and see if there might be an escape for humanity.
Right, so. If you are not familiar with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, baryons, star life cycles, and the more speculative and bizarre edges of string theory (which, okay, are generally indistinguishable from all of string theory), then do not read this book. 'Cause it won't explain any of that to you, and you'll be left reading a jerkily paced, rather bloodless book with wobbly dialogue, shoddy social structures, and talking-head characters.
If you are familiar with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, baryons, star life cycles, and the more bizarre and speculative edges of string theory, then totally read it for the shiny and ignore all the annoying bits with people in them. I fall into this category, and I generally managed to have a good time.
. . . which in itself is annoying, because I really don't think I'm the only one who finds the shiny much shinier when it's set in a story fabric that I actually care about. I mean, this book is about the destruction of the known universe and the survival of the species, and I never managed to care whether anyone lived or died. There's a reason hard SF has the reputation it does, though I will keep swearing that nothing intrinsic to the genre requires it -- a bullshit cop-out, if I ever heard one.
Right, so. If you are not familiar with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, baryons, star life cycles, and the more speculative and bizarre edges of string theory (which, okay, are generally indistinguishable from all of string theory), then do not read this book. 'Cause it won't explain any of that to you, and you'll be left reading a jerkily paced, rather bloodless book with wobbly dialogue, shoddy social structures, and talking-head characters.
If you are familiar with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, baryons, star life cycles, and the more bizarre and speculative edges of string theory, then totally read it for the shiny and ignore all the annoying bits with people in them. I fall into this category, and I generally managed to have a good time.
. . . which in itself is annoying, because I really don't think I'm the only one who finds the shiny much shinier when it's set in a story fabric that I actually care about. I mean, this book is about the destruction of the known universe and the survival of the species, and I never managed to care whether anyone lived or died. There's a reason hard SF has the reputation it does, though I will keep swearing that nothing intrinsic to the genre requires it -- a bullshit cop-out, if I ever heard one.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-21 01:05 pm (UTC)We both enjoyed his Mars trilogy very much. (It's sort of a tetralogy, as there is a collection of short stories that fit in and around the three novels.) I'm just now reading the Science in the Capital trilogy and liking that too. Haven't tried the Three Californias books yet.
Robinson's stories center around climatology. Although his characters do tend to cluster toward the geeky end of the scale, they're not bloodless -- I ended up caring about the First Hundred settlers of Mars very much.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-21 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-21 05:38 pm (UTC)