This time Alastair teams up with Stephen Baxter to write this interesting yarn, taking us from an alternative history of the Apollo missions all the way into the deep heart of Jupiter, hundreds of years later.

As usual with anything Alastair Reynolds, it's just great all round writing.   What i really liked about this one is the recreation of Jupiter with a whole eco system going on all the way down to the core of the planet.

Once again we've plenty of AI stuff going on, and going wrong on a cosmic scale (rapidly approaching an Earth near you, in case you've been sleeping under a rock and hadn't noticed), and a solar-system wide war with a cyborg, running/wheeling/flying around, trying to make peace between everyone.

It's a really good novel, and whether you believe me or not, i don't care.   If you don't want to read it, just because i think it's really good, then that's your loss, not mine.

Next up from Alastair is Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee, which i'm diving straight into in my quest to read everything by Alastair before the AI's take over and destroy everything of value that ever existed and turn the Earth into a volcanic wasteland (which won't be long, according to some people).

Bye for now. ( )

Höfundarnir Stephen Baxter og Alastair Reynolds halda áfram með sögu Arthurs C. Clarke um Howard Falcon sem sendur var í rannsóknarferð til Júpiters þar sem hann fann líf á hnettinum. Vel skrifuð og skemmtila unnið áfram með heim Clarkes og hvernig valdablokkir mannsins takast á um nálgun við þessar geimverur. ( )

I loved how this managed to read like 70s sci-fi. Not exactly groundbreaking but they nailed the style. I think it's a worthy realisation of the book hinted at by the original short-story. ( )

I struggled with this until nearly the half-way mark, considering quitting a couple of times. I'm used to slow starts from Reynolds' solo books but this one wasn't so much slow as terribly disjointed, making it difficult to get involved with the story. Abrupt leaps in the passage of time with very little apparent connective tissue stopped it feeling much like a novel at all and had me wondering if a "story suite" (as Le Guin would call it) of shorts would have been a better idea. The second half works more like a traditional novel narrative and allowed me to connect more to characters and see what all the preceding vignettes were for, thus rescuing the book for me.

I haven't read any Baxter prior to this but I can see the influence of Reynolds all over it. ( )

Two of my favorite authors collaborated to bring me a continuation of a classic Arthur C Clarke story.

I admit I was a bit hesitant. Not overly much, mind you, because these authors are all heavy-hitters, but the fact remains we're dealing with a character-driven transhuman cyborg from the science of 1971. His name is Falcon. For me, I was thinking it was going to be like one of those spin-offs of golden-age SF revamped for modern consumption and excised of nasty and/or embarrassing elements.

I was *mostly* wrong.

Instead, Falcon and the machine intelligence Adam are treated to over a half-century of future history as we deal with our natures. And as for "we", I mean ANY kind of intelligence. Machine, human, Medusa (in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter) or OTHER.

I was pretty much "okay" with the character development and the ongoing history and the treatment of old-SF ideas such as machines pushing us organics aside or interplanetary war over resources or just the focus of a single good man (or cyborg) playing fair with all sides in mind with a long-term good.

This was all very nice and a very welcome change from the darkness or utter realism of most modern SF. I steadily got more interested in the tale as time progressed, and far from the tired "humans unshackle themselves from our machine overlords" kind of tale, we get something awe-inspiring and optimistic.

I dare say we got a true by-the-heart continuation of Arthur C. Clarke. :)

Well worth the admission price. Would make a delightful Sunday afternoon cartoon marathon. :) ( )