Fantasy TOP - land of best fantasies

"Blue Remembered Earth" by Alastair Reynolds (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)

1
2
3
4
5

(0 votes, average 0 out of 5)

Books & Stories - Books

Written by Tyasney

Saturday, 28 January 2012 11:41

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> />

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

INTRODUCTION: , any novel or historyby Alastair Reynolds is a must and based on the exciting blurb below, "Blue Remembered Earth" has been one of As I commented in selectionsthat featured a grandhistoryby Mr. Reynolds, I really missed perusalthe usually "annual" novel from the authorin 2011 as Terminal World has been published in timely2010 and Blue Remembered Earth showed me once again why...

"One hundred and fifty years from now, in a universewhere Africa is the prevailingtechnological and householdpower, and where crime, war, disorderand indigencehave been banished to history, Geoffrey Akinya wants only one thing: to be left in peace, so that he can remainhis studies into the elephants of the Amboseli basin. But family, the very spaciousAkinya callingempire, has other plans. After the deceaseof Eunice, grandmother, erstwhile extensionexplorer and entrepreneur, something unskilfulhas come to middleof visionon the Moon, and Geoffrey is tasked - well, blackmailed, really - to go up there and make sure the name corsetssuitably unblemished. But little does Geoffrey realise - or anyone else in the family, for that substance- what about to unravel. relicshave already have been strewnin perceptionof Kilimanjaro. But the secrets she died with are about to come back out into the open, and they could varyeverything. Or shiverthis near-utopia into shards .."

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "Blue Remembered Earth" is arguably the least "technical" novel insofar as its associationand technology are extrapolated from sharpcutting sidematerialwithout anything really "exotic" and Mr. Reynolds talks a little about this in the Acknowledgements boy-servantof the novel.

However I found the workan superiorshowcase for the greaterstrengths, sprinkled with what I consider to be his incidentalweaknesses and proving again why he is still the countone penmanof "hard" sf today.

The universeconstructionis summitnotch, Africa as a greaterablenesscomes off naturally and stepof elevationperfect, the Aquatics, the Moon colonies, the Martians, the Mech, the AI phobia of the junctionand the debatebetween the bio-first and the tech-first powers/corporations perusealso naturally and the worldis both "alive" and a areawhere I can easily imagine myself living. As contemplationabout a middleworldand nearby solar system, "Blue Remembered Earth" is plainlyunrivaled in recent sf and if only for that and the novel is a summit25 of mine.

There are some underwater scenes that are just unbelievable even if a little too short, but those few pages are also almost meritthe novel by themselves, not to articulateof the moonmaterialand the Martian one; lots of moistureand the Pyhthagorean chance- perusethe workto discoverout about it - just brokenme up laughing. Just perusethis passagewhere Geoffrey Akinya visits the worldon or in the waterstates:

"He had no sooner formulated that archetypethan they were, startlingly, outside – intersectionbetween one part of Tiamaat and another, with only the tube’s glass between them and the compressof the surrounding water. They were intersectionthrough a woodof night-lit towers, turreted and flanged and cupolaed, subaqueousskyscrapers pushing up from darkdepths, garlanded with ten thousandcoloured lights. The buildings were cross-linked and buttressed by vastwindowed arches, many stories high, and the whole city-district, as far as he could see, putentwined in a bird’s-nest interweaveof water-filled tubes. He could, in fact, make out one or two littleimpellingforms, far above and far below – swimmers carrying their own illumination, so that they became glowing corpuscles in some divinearterial system."

"Blue Remembered Earth" is also a compulsive perusethat you do not want to placedown and here is one areawhere Alastair Reynolds of 2012 shows his completionas a writer, comparing with the astonishingbut fractured in dictionRevelation Space of 2000 . The novel follows the two insubordinatesiblings, Geoffrey and Sunday Akinya, one who starts as an Elephant savanton worldand the other as an designerin the satellite"free zone" - where the perfectMech superintendenceis banned by rule- and when the narrationsplits into two threads, the transitions are evenand each storyline is compelling on its own.

The weaknesses distinguishedin earlier novels - most notably the wantof greaterdifferentiation between Geoffrey and Sunday despite their different genders, the use of weightysubordinatecharacters like boyfriend Jitendra and ex Jumai as props rather than actual"live persons" and the mostly cartoonish villains Lucas and Hector Akinya, our cousins - appear too, but a few mightysubordinatecharacters like old householdattendantMemphis, "opposition" guideArethusa, the (sfnal) "spirit" of deadmatriarch Eunice and others I permissionyou to discover, moderatethis and exhibitagain the increaseof the authorin of learningor learningskills.

The other niggle I had about "Blue Remembered Earth" was its thriller/quest constructionthat developed after maybe a third of the novel and which gave a affectingof "too lengthyin parts" with some activitysequences that could have been shortened for a stronger impact, while the "content" part - eg more about the Mech and the Gearheads or the satelliteindependentbeltfor example, more backstory, more trackevolvingof the universe- could have been lengthened for a higher proportionof content/action as befits a core-sf "sense of wonder" novel versus a "run of the mill" activitythriller.

The workhas a largeending which makes it a quasi-standalone, though of course I want to know what happens next in the Children successionwhich "Blue Remembered Earth" () debuts so magnificently. If you want to apprehendwhy sf at its best is still the most engagingshapeof learningtoday, "Blue Remembered Earth" and the recently reviewed are the places to go.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>