Blue Remembered Earth

An interesting storyline and interesting characters, but the writing felt consistently flat and I struggled to get through much of the book.

Blue Remembered Earth is good SF – as I have come to expect from Alastair Reynolds. Not his top work for me (that place is held by [b:Pushing Ice 89186 Pushing Ice Alastair Reynolds https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309197028l/89186.SY75.jpg 2622804] followed by [b:The Prefect 89195 The Prefect (Prefect Dreyfus Emergency, #1) Alastair Reynolds https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327988786l/89195.SX50.jpg 3102565]), but still a good read.Late in the 22nd century multiple global crises have changed the geopolitical landscape, and Africa is home to the major powers. Geoffrey Akinya is a biologist. Though he is a member of the powerful Akinya Space clan, he is only interested in studying elephants and enabling their future. However, that is not to be. When his famous grandmother dies, he is tasked with retrieving something listed in her will. That sets Geoffrey and his sister off following clues to an old mystery. Their quest will take them all over the solar system. Along the way they find unexpected allies, suffer betrayals, and encounter lots of desperate situations.As usual with an Alastair Reynolds story, there are lots of twists and cool speculations on future tech.Solid 4 stars.

No redeemable features whatsoever. I kept reading waiting for the plot set up, there was none. Three hours in and no plot, no connection with any of the characters, no interesting world building. And you would expect that a post world ending war with humanity colonizing other planets things would be interesting.

I stopped reading after the most interesting thing that happened was the discover of a glove in a safe box in a bank on the moon, an inheritance for the members of the family of the woman that seems like was a key factor in humanity colonizing other planets.

Too much stalling to reveal how important that glove was, and then there was the introduction of human like AIs, robots that could mimic human personalities based on historical facts collected about that person. That was too much for me. “Hey grandma, what does this mysterious glove that no one knew existed means? Grandma robot: I don't know”. Don't know? Really? I'm SHOCKED!

Read 3:06 / 21:45 14%

I have to admit, going solely on the back cover blurb, I was skeptical about this book, putting it off as a TBR for the last few years. I finally found a copy at a used bookstore and was in the mood for something that was a bit more meaty than usual faire of Sci-Fi I'd been reading later.

What won me over in the end was that it was an Alastair Reynolds book. I loved his Revelation Space books; the same can be said for this first chapter in the Poseidon's Children series. It starts off as a future drama, but quickly unfolds into the kind of space opera I've come to enjoy. We worth the week long marathon I spent reading it :)

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite authors whom I stumbled upon quite by happy accident. I've read almost all of his novels, with one the best being [b:Pushing Ice 89186 Pushing Ice Alastair Reynolds http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309197028s/89186.jpg 2622804], and I'm also a big fan of his Revelation Space series and world. I had a very high bar set for this novel, the first of a supposed 10 I believe.At the beginning, we meet young Sunday and Geoffrey Akinya, siblings who live in future Africa. These two come across an antiquated tank buried in the earth with machinery that somehow gives Sunday a seizure. This is some foreshadowing of things to come. The rest of the novel focuses on the travels of Sunday and Geoffrey as they travel literally across the solar system searching for clues that their grandmother Eunice left for them when she died.That this novel is the first of a series is made pretty obvious by the author's inclusion of so much future tech. Geoffrey lives in the Surveilled World while Sunday chooses to live a little more incognito in the Descrutinised Zone (only on a certain part of the moon). The Mechanism is implied to some kind of thinking machine that watches all humans and can predict their behavior. For instance, at some point Geoffrey attempts to punch someone but is stopped by The Mechanism's communication with something in his own head. The Mechanism has drastically reduced crime on Earth, but there is an ominous feeling like that of Philip K Dick's Minority Report, which is why Sunday chooses to live on the moon.Like other Reynolds novels, there are plenty of heavily modified humans, especially the mer-people. They live in a city in the ocean. Also, there are intelligent projections that can live in golems, long lives, and an abandoned area of Mars run by robots. I love it.After finishing the book, it actually seems like nothing really substantial happened, but the journey there was awesomely adventurous. This novel lived up to what I hope it would be!

What a thoroughly enjoyable story. From the respect of science, through the centering on Africa and China to the positing of how a world would be shaped by a loss of privacy and the experience of surviving catastrophe, I find very little unpleasant in Blue Remembered Earth. In fact at the moment I can think of nothing. It is. Mystery and adventure story with robots spaceships, intrigue and murder. And while you may guess certain points along the way it will surprise you often. Read it.