Hard science-fiction at its best, a revelation even: Egan considers every single aspect of post-physical humanity, when we’ll be raised in silicon silos and infinitely copyable.
The last third of the book branches into that one classical sci-fi topic I kinda hate, but it’s okay because the beginning was well worth it.
A little less fascinating, and with so much more of that aforementioned topic I don’t like (in case that wasn’t clear, I’m trying not to spoil the story), but it’s a good read anyway, and I just like the premise: one day, humanity woke up and there were no stars in the sky, our solar system was sealed inside a hermetic bubble.
Not my usual kind of book, but I was curious to see what Dan Simmons wrote when he channeled Stephen King. It’s well written, but a very unoriginal story, and I’m so not interested in the adventures of a bunch of clichē kids in the clichē American sixties (even if they’re all gonna end up dismembered).
All in all, it’s a good adventure novel, and I’m not surprised it found success and an upcoming TV adaptation (it has good ideas, most of which aren’t particularly original but well integrated and developed), but I just can’t condone a book where the villain’s second happens to be a sadistic homosexual pedophile.
It would be one thing if the book had been written in 1950, but it was published in 1994.
Haldeman was a geek who got sent to Vietnam (for the younger listeners: there was a war there, and it wasn’t pretty), and that shows: the book is more about war than it is about sci-fi, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good SF either (because, like I said, he’s also a geek).
Good story progression (the beginning makes you fear that you’re gonna spend the whole book bogged down in the ugly details of low-tech combat in a vacuum, but the author knows to make his story grow and stay fresh), an interesting read with well written characters and some gripping scenes.
Twenty years later, the writer’s style has nicely evolved (taking on the more cynical humor of the times) and he takes on different aspects of futuristic war — clearly, he’s still convinced the world is going to hell in a handbasket, a misanthrope after my own heart (except for the obsession with gender issues).
Less memorable than The Forever War, but still interesting.
Another revelation, this: while it may be a classic sci-fi device, the author masterfully describes the life of spider-like aliens in a way that makes you forget they’re not human, yet never contradicts their nature and remains faithful to the few details that couldn’t be translated simply to humankind (like babies peeking through the fur on their father’s back, or expressing emotions with the movement of your “eating hands”) — plus, it’s nicely justified in the novel itself by the people who are “actually” translating those adventures.
And the story-telling is excellent, too, with two parallel stories unfolding, one with the spiders evolving into their space-faring age, the other with different factions of observing humans bogged down in machinations and rebellion on their orbital base, all of which is very nicely paced (you spend the first few chapters dreading that the balance of forces being set up will belaboredly drag itself over 800 pages, and it all ends up turned on its head ten pages later).
A masterpiece of science-fiction, on every level.
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