Kim Miller
Alvin lives in the city of Diaspar. He's a young man who has a problem. He can't remember any of his past lives as expected, and as is the experience of everyone around him. The city births its citizens according to the inner thoughts of a central computer. And at the end of their lives it takes them back into itself, to be birthed again in some distant future.
But Alvin is a disruptor. He is curious. He wants to know what is outside the city. He goes exploring. All of these are not the life of his companions.
With the help of the mysterious city jester, another disruptor, he finds his way into the depths of the city and out to the wider world. And in that moment he seals the fate of the city to a future they have feared for a billion years.
The book is let down by long passages of descriptions of what Alvin sees on his travels, material that does not move the story along. The characters are also a bit thin until Alvin meets Hilvar who becomes his traveling companion and his first ever real friend. Hilvar brings a certain kind of humanity to Alvin and to the story.
Alvin and Hilvar travel to distant stars to try to understand the origins of Earth's current situation, a place trying to recover from inter-planetary warfare. They return to find the city in crisis, and Alvin at last learns the reason for his existence. The book closes on a world that knows it has change, and it is only in the closing pages that Alvin starts to draw some emotion from the reader as he realises who he is, what he has done, and what will be his future.
Alvin lives in the city of Diaspar. He's a young man who has a problem. He can't remember any of his past lives as expected, and as is the experience of everyone around him. The city births its citizens according to the inner thoughts of a central computer. And at the end of their lives it takes them back into itself, to be birthed again in some distant future.
But Alvin is a disruptor. He is curious. He wants to know what is outside the city. He goes exploring. All of these are not the life of his companions.
With the help of the mysterious city jester, another disruptor, he finds his way into the depths of the city and out to the wider world. And in that moment he seals the fate of the city to a future they have feared for a billion years.
The book is let down by long passages of descriptions of what Alvin sees on his travels, material that does not move the story along. The characters are also a bit thin until Alvin meets Hilvar who becomes his traveling companion and his first ever real friend. Hilvar brings a certain kind of humanity to Alvin and to the story.
Alvin and Hilvar travel to distant stars to try to understand the origins of Earth's current situation, a place trying to recover from inter-planetary warfare. They return to find the city in crisis, and Alvin at last learns the reason for his existence. The book closes on a world that knows it has change, and it is only in the closing pages that Alvin starts to draw some emotion from the reader as he realises who he is, what he has done, and what will be his future.
Thousands of years ago a monastery was established on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. It was intended as the elevation of humankind into the heavens, and although fraught with internal factions, it lasted for centuries. And in the not so distant future a space engineer wanted to use the mountain to construct a space elevator that would link to a geostationary satellite 24,000 miles above the Earth. Humans have established colonies on the Moon and Mars and the elevator will reduce rocket transport.
Clarke blends the story of the monastery into the similarly themed story of the space elevator. The engineer has achieved 'top monk' status by building a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar and is almost a prophet of engineering. But other political forces are against him. Into the political mix comes an ambassador from Mars who wants the project moved to his planet. There's nothing like a bit of FOMO to stir things along. And there's also an alien 'thing' like a mini Rendezvous with Rama that wanders past.
Clarke takes us through some of the hard science stuff of building the elevator and the story jumps along over much of the construction. The monastery has dissolved too easily in a paragraph or two to clear the way. Because we all know Clarke's repetition of 'religion will disappear' message.
It all goes along pretty well until there's a life and death crisis. At last there's something happening that gets my heart beating faster. Clarke is usually not so intent on making his characters really human but here we see him digging deeper.
The wrap up takes us into the far future. The elevator has been successfully completed. It's so successful that there are several around the planet and, guess what, they're linked together in a ring around the Earth. And the alien 'thing' returns for Clarke to tell us again the children are the future.
It's a great story and won awards but loses a star from me for some of the tropes that flow too easily onto the page.
Thousands of years ago a monastery was established on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. It was intended as the elevation of humankind into the heavens, and although fraught with internal factions, it lasted for centuries. And in the not so distant future a space engineer wanted to use the mountain to construct a space elevator that would link to a geostationary satellite 24,000 miles above the Earth. Humans have established colonies on the Moon and Mars and the elevator will reduce rocket transport.
Clarke blends the story of the monastery into the similarly themed story of the space elevator. The engineer has achieved 'top monk' status by building a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar and is almost a prophet of engineering. But other political forces are against him. Into the political mix comes an ambassador from Mars who wants the project moved to his planet. There's nothing like a bit of FOMO to stir things along. And there's also an alien 'thing' like a mini Rendezvous with Rama that wanders past.
Clarke takes us through some of the hard science stuff of building the elevator and the story jumps along over much of the construction. The monastery has dissolved too easily in a paragraph or two to clear the way. Because we all know Clarke's repetition of 'religion will disappear' message.
It all goes along pretty well until there's a life and death crisis. At last there's something happening that gets my heart beating faster. Clarke is usually not so intent on making his characters really human but here we see him digging deeper.
The wrap up takes us into the far future. The elevator has been successfully completed. It's so successful that there are several around the planet and, guess what, they're linked together in a ring around the Earth. And the alien 'thing' returns for Clarke to tell us again the children are the future.
It's a great story and won awards but loses a star from me for some of the tropes that flow too easily onto the page.
A detective is called to a New York building where a woman is sitting on a parapet hundreds of feet above the street. He tries to talk her back. She says she can't live with the memories of a second life that flood her mind. She called it FMS, False Memory Syndrome.
The woman is not alone as an increasing number of people suffer from the same thing. The detective does some off-book digging and finds evidence for the other life the woman experiences. But then he finds himself immersed in the same experience.
Recursion is a novel of repeats. Repeated lives, repeated experiences, repeated trauma. Crouch has framed this SciFi theme in a new and well thought out narrative. The science is well done but the standout for me was the character development.
The detective moves from a man running from overbearing grief to somebody intent on making sure that what he experiences stops with him. The scientist is driven by her mother's dementia to find a way of stopping her decline but finds herself in a high stakes battle of wits. Another character thinks he's saving the world while his ego driven desires are endangering everything.
I found myself engaging with the characters at a very personal level. They were not merely shapes on the page but people with widely shared human frailty and struggles. And the wrapping of it all in an exploration of time and memory was skillfully handled.
Recursion has earned a place with such works as the movie Primer and the novels, The Lathe of Heaven and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
A detective is called to a New York building where a woman is sitting on a parapet hundreds of feet above the street. He tries to talk her back. She says she can't live with the memories of a second life that flood her mind. She called it FMS, False Memory Syndrome.
The woman is not alone as an increasing number of people suffer from the same thing. The detective does some off-book digging and finds evidence for the other life the woman experiences. But then he finds himself immersed in the same experience.
Recursion is a novel of repeats. Repeated lives, repeated experiences, repeated trauma. Crouch has framed this SciFi theme in a new and well thought out narrative. The science is well done but the standout for me was the character development.
The detective moves from a man running from overbearing grief to somebody intent on making sure that what he experiences stops with him. The scientist is driven by her mother's dementia to find a way of stopping her decline but finds herself in a high stakes battle of wits. Another character thinks he's saving the world while his ego driven desires are endangering everything.
I found myself engaging with the characters at a very personal level. They were not merely shapes on the page but people with widely shared human frailty and struggles. And the wrapping of it all in an exploration of time and memory was skillfully handled.
Recursion has earned a place with such works as the movie Primer and the novels, The Lathe of Heaven and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
PKD novels need a rating scale from ho-hum through weird to trippy, with a few more levels thrown in somewhere. If Ubik and Palmer Eldritch are trippy, Dr. Bloodmoney falls into weird.
A sudden nuclear war leaves the world mostly destroyed, with small communities forming around centres of survival. We find ourselves amid a disparate bunch of people struggling to make sense of things. The Dr.Bloodmoney character is a minor player for most of the narrative. In focus are a young man born with no limbs because of thalidomide but with telekinetic ability, and a young girl whose imaginary brother turns out to be a parasitic twin in her belly. These three form a centre of warring power against each other.
Above them all is an astronaut, stranded in orbit from which he transmits book readings and DJ music to the world. The only surviving radio broadcast on Earth.
The story is one of dark humor, the writing off-handed, and the characters totally unbelievable. But PKD uses his inner weirdness to pull it together into a tale of guilt, power, and a desire for peace and calm. He starts with a bland city street encounter but ends with a growing sense of unease as a crisis builds. And suddenly it's over. Not with a bang but a whimper. OK, that's probably the way nuclear war always ends.
PKD novels need a rating scale from ho-hum through weird to trippy, with a few more levels thrown in somewhere. If Ubik and Palmer Eldritch are trippy, Dr. Bloodmoney falls into weird.
A sudden nuclear war leaves the world mostly destroyed, with small communities forming around centres of survival. We find ourselves amid a disparate bunch of people struggling to make sense of things. The Dr.Bloodmoney character is a minor player for most of the narrative. In focus are a young man born with no limbs because of thalidomide but with telekinetic ability, and a young girl whose imaginary brother turns out to be a parasitic twin in her belly. These three form a centre of warring power against each other.
Above them all is an astronaut, stranded in orbit from which he transmits book readings and DJ music to the world. The only surviving radio broadcast on Earth.
The story is one of dark humor, the writing off-handed, and the characters totally unbelievable. But PKD uses his inner weirdness to pull it together into a tale of guilt, power, and a desire for peace and calm. He starts with a bland city street encounter but ends with a growing sense of unease as a crisis builds. And suddenly it's over. Not with a bang but a whimper. OK, that's probably the way nuclear war always ends.
The direct follow-on from Ilium. Ilium finished at convenient point rather than a satisfactory point. Neither book really stands on its own. And both are long, with a combined page count of about 1,500 pages.
Olympos exposes more of the underlying thought of the Ilium universe. The three threads of the story start to bounce off each other. The literary scholar monitoring the Trojan war for the gods of Olympus inserts himself into the events, thus causing Homer's history to come unstuck. The far future humans are under attack from the biomachines that have been their servants for centuries. And this ancient Greek guy named Odysseus has turned up to teach them hand to hand battle skills. The Shakespeare and Proust quoting robots have been co-opted by an advanced alien race to find out why there is such a dangerous level of quantum emissions from a mountain on Mars.
The literary sparing between the robots continues to form the scaffolding of much of the story. And their interactions slowly suggest what is behind the time/location shifts of the overall work. Simmons suggests that when a genius, like Shakepeare or Homer, writes a genius work, like The Tempest or The Iliad, then those worlds are brought into being as alternate universes. And Simmons' story jumps between them without barriers.
Olympos does the time/place jumps effortlessly, so effortlessly that the reader follows on accepting what is happening without necessarily seeing this underlying schema.
The book has countless side plots that can get a bit heavy-handed but as the story speeds up in the final 25% of the book these tangents are shown to have some bearing on the final outcome. Simmons manages to keep a lot of balls in the air in this process. There is also a lot of little comments in the book that might be seen as easter eggs that Simmons has left lying around. While there is no deliberate humor in the overall work, these little pop-ups give a bit of light relief if we notice them.
And while I said there is no deliberate humor, as the book progresses there is a growing sense in which Simmons is saying, "How can I totally mess up the historical narrative of Homer and keep people engaged?" Imagine that Banksy has just painted over some famous work and people say, 'Yep, that works for me'.
The direct follow-on from Ilium. Ilium finished at convenient point rather than a satisfactory point. Neither book really stands on its own. And both are long, with a combined page count of about 1,500 pages.
Olympos exposes more of the underlying thought of the Ilium universe. The three threads of the story start to bounce off each other. The literary scholar monitoring the Trojan war for the gods of Olympus inserts himself into the events, thus causing Homer's history to come unstuck. The far future humans are under attack from the biomachines that have been their servants for centuries. And this ancient Greek guy named Odysseus has turned up to teach them hand to hand battle skills. The Shakespeare and Proust quoting robots have been co-opted by an advanced alien race to find out why there is such a dangerous level of quantum emissions from a mountain on Mars.
The literary sparing between the robots continues to form the scaffolding of much of the story. And their interactions slowly suggest what is behind the time/location shifts of the overall work. Simmons suggests that when a genius, like Shakepeare or Homer, writes a genius work, like The Tempest or The Iliad, then those worlds are brought into being as alternate universes. And Simmons' story jumps between them without barriers.
Olympos does the time/place jumps effortlessly, so effortlessly that the reader follows on accepting what is happening without necessarily seeing this underlying schema.
The book has countless side plots that can get a bit heavy-handed but as the story speeds up in the final 25% of the book these tangents are shown to have some bearing on the final outcome. Simmons manages to keep a lot of balls in the air in this process. There is also a lot of little comments in the book that might be seen as easter eggs that Simmons has left lying around. While there is no deliberate humor in the overall work, these little pop-ups give a bit of light relief if we notice them.
And while I said there is no deliberate humor, as the book progresses there is a growing sense in which Simmons is saying, "How can I totally mess up the historical narrative of Homer and keep people engaged?" Imagine that Banksy has just painted over some famous work and people say, 'Yep, that works for me'.
This is book #1 of a pair, and it ends pointing the reader to the next book.
Three stories more or less intertwine. A literary scholar is watching over the Trojan war and reporting back to the gods on Olympus. He's long dead but has been revived/remade by the gods. His job is to monitor how the progress of the war matches the stories of Homer, his academic speciality.
Second thread is a Shakespeare quoting robot from one of Jupiter's moons who has a submarine and is sent on a strange journey. A second robot is a fan of Proust and the two form a sparring friendship. Third thread is a group of humans living under an existential threat in a far future Earth. Their life seems to be perfection and Elysium but it's about to fall apart.
Simmons has packed the story with literary references from Greek historians, Shakespeare, Proust, Nabokov, and some modern poets. It gets a bit overloaded at times where long literary conversations are used to steer the plot. However, his prose is good and the characters are well fleshed out for the most part, once we figure out who is human and who is something else. Also, Simmons should not try to write sex scenes.
There are time shifts that take some thought to work out as we move from ancient Troy to far future humans, to several aliens with varying levels of AI enhancement, to the gods on Olympus that mysteriously seem to have a lot of quantum science on their side.
The story moves along pretty well but it takes a long time before the three threads start to move toward each other. And the book ends with only the beginnings of some contact between the threads.
This is book #1 of a pair, and it ends pointing the reader to the next book.
Three stories more or less intertwine. A literary scholar is watching over the Trojan war and reporting back to the gods on Olympus. He's long dead but has been revived/remade by the gods. His job is to monitor how the progress of the war matches the stories of Homer, his academic speciality.
Second thread is a Shakespeare quoting robot from one of Jupiter's moons who has a submarine and is sent on a strange journey. A second robot is a fan of Proust and the two form a sparring friendship. Third thread is a group of humans living under an existential threat in a far future Earth. Their life seems to be perfection and Elysium but it's about to fall apart.
Simmons has packed the story with literary references from Greek historians, Shakespeare, Proust, Nabokov, and some modern poets. It gets a bit overloaded at times where long literary conversations are used to steer the plot. However, his prose is good and the characters are well fleshed out for the most part, once we figure out who is human and who is something else. Also, Simmons should not try to write sex scenes.
There are time shifts that take some thought to work out as we move from ancient Troy to far future humans, to several aliens with varying levels of AI enhancement, to the gods on Olympus that mysteriously seem to have a lot of quantum science on their side.
The story moves along pretty well but it takes a long time before the three threads start to move toward each other. And the book ends with only the beginnings of some contact between the threads.