I turned 49 last week. Not quite 50, but it’s a looming figure that’s no longer quite so distant. I didn’t write about it last weekend because I was busy the whole time. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with basically little opportunity to sit down for a few hours to ruminate. But now I’m in an airplane returning from a client trip to DC, and I have nothing but time, and I can finish it any time after I land.
Alastair Reynolds has been both one of my favorite, and most hated authors. I tend to enjoy his one-shots more than his series, maybe because he doesn’t have time to write himself into a corner. So too with House of Suns, a book I neglected reading for over a year because I was so put off by Absolution Gap’s meandering nonsense.
When I’m reading multiple books simultaneously, it’s usually because I’ve relegated one to my “before bed” pile. Absolution Gap, the conclusion of Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space series, was one of those. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the longer books I’ve attacked in a couple months, and half an hour per night hardly pays quick dividends. Even worse, Reynolds’ writing style is copious and unrelenting; I felt every single one of those pages.
Once again, Alastair Reynolds cranks out a weighty tome in Redemption Ark (Part of the Revelation Space universe) that proves, at least to me, hard SciFi can be surprisingly entertaining.
Part of the problem with sticking directly to physics, as Alastair with his Ph.D. in Astronomy is likely to do, is that space travel is necessarily limited to current breakthroughs in physics, even when targeted hundreds or thousands of years in the future. It’s both refreshing to see slow acceleration of two or three Gs and all the problems that entails, and frustratingly annoying to read hundreds of pages of space-battle that effectively amounts to dodging obstacles for objective years of travel time.