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Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Half nanotech posthuman twenty-third century space opera, half alternate history 1959 with no World War II Parisian noir detective story.

Cool in concept, limp in execution. Ham-handed character work, kind of plodding in places, even as the cool skiffy ideas keep coming. Reynolds can do better. But enough about that, let’s talk about me!

I am so pleased to have read a book that didn’t actively piss me off, I’m feeling quite beneficent over here. That, and not coincidentally, my pain levels have precipitously dropped in the past few days. (Seriously, it was the retina with less scar tissue this time, but I swear to God I could feel it throbbing in my jaw). But now it is over, and this book was inoffensively entertaining, so it’s getting an extra star from me. Extra stars for everyone!

Someday I really need to glance back through the last half dozen or so books that collectively left me hostile. I think they’ll still all piss me off, but there was an awful lot of ow going on there, so you never know.

Yay proper blood flow! Yay books! Yay stars! Yay Goodreads!

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Humans of the twenty-sixth century live in a galaxy more empty than it really should be, haunted by the ghosts of species long extinct. There's 550 pages of intricate plotting here, so I'll just say it's a hard SF novel that jumps from an archaeological expedition to an alien plague to quantum mechanics to neuroprogramming.

The good: Women! who are cool! and who do very cool things! Shiny hard SF ideas. A scattering of really disturbing and effective images that will stick with me. Excellent and creative worldbuilding.

The meh: Choppy timing. A few stupid writer tricks. Over-stretched dramatics.

I think hard SF is like a gecko. I'm like, "ooh, you're an awfully cool little reptile, aren't you?" and it totally is, but at a certain point I start thinking, "you know, my dog is nice and furry. I like furry." Which is an overtired way of saying that I enjoyed this book and will be getting the sequel, but it suffers from the perennial hard SF problem -- characters who are so futurified, there's very little to latch onto.

But really good, for hard SF -- definitely my favorite of the recent reads (Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, etc). Also see above re: women, because that really can't be over-emphasized.