I want to make it clear that I don't lightly write rave reviews. Please read the following sentence twice:
This is an absolutely fantastic book.
On the I want to make it clear that I don't lightly write rave reviews. Please read the following sentence twice:
This is an absolutely fantastic book.
On the outskirts of the Galaxy, far from the physical constraints of the Galactic core, faster-than-light travel is possible, and Transcended intelligences flourish to a complexity that dwarfs human comprehension. Scavenging for buried knowledge on a dead world, a party of humans awakes an ancient evil: an archive containing an entity so powerful and so malign that it begins to sweep across the galaxy, overwhelming even the godlike Powers of the Transcend.
Some of the humans escape towards the galactic plane, bearing a little-understood cargo that represents the galaxy's only possible weapon against the Blight. They crash-land on an alien world, leaving only two survivors, both of them children -- who are promptly snatched by opposing alien factions. But the aliens' low-tech society is promptly and drastically destabilised by the humans' technology, leaving the children struggling for survival while a rescue mission tears across the galaxy towards them, harried and pursued by everything the Blight can throw on their trail.
This book has everything. Wild adventure, colossal scale, soaring imagination, searing insight, deep characterisation, brilliant plotting, profound suspense, complex and cunningly-realised aliens -- and, most of all, an astonishing richness of that special quality of science fiction, which is the speculative investigation of other worlds, other intelligences, whole other ways of being.
It's not perfect. If you're a hard sci-fi buff like me, then it seems convenient not only that the alien biosphere will support human life, but that the aliens themselves are mentally compatible with humans. And for a Transcended being whose intelligence is to humans as humans are to microbes, the Blight seems remarkably... well, human in its motivations. But, frankly, Vinge is forgiven these devices to make his plot work. For a book this good, I could forgive just about anything....more
Iain M. Banks is the lion of contemporary British science-fiction, and this book fully displays his craft, his style and his unbridled imagination. LiIain M. Banks is the lion of contemporary British science-fiction, and this book fully displays his craft, his style and his unbridled imagination. Like most of Banks's science fiction, it involves his utopian Culture of benevolent hyper-intelligent machines, but the story itself is that of a low-technology society being manipulated to its own destruction by advanced civilisations whose aims it finds incomprehensible -- but which may themselves be only the pawns of some ancient and malign intelligence.
This is a very good book and I unhesitatingly recommend it. Even so, it isn't one of Banks's finest. It lacks the quality of insight and enquiry that marks the best science fiction. Banks's Excession, for example, delves deeply into the threats that might beset even a vastly advanced civilisation; Look To Windward weaves a fantastic narrative with an intelligent investigation of the value of human endeavour in a Materialist utopia. Matter does introduce a few interesting concepts of its own, but basically it's just a great story.
If you like Banks, you'll like this. If you haven't tried Banks yet, then go and read Excession first (and, by the way, it'll blow your mind!)....more
Absolutely ghastly first draught and associated short stories from the classic sci-fi novel, mangled and made strident by the author’s notably untalenAbsolutely ghastly first draught and associated short stories from the classic sci-fi novel, mangled and made strident by the author’s notably untalented son. Occasional excerpts and letters from Herbert pater provide a glimmer of lucidity that only accentuates the gruesomeness of the rest. For Dune freaks and masochists only....more