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Aug. 26th, 2015 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe person I work with most closely at my job is a very dedicated climate change activist, and after about a year of constant exposure I've hit a point where I really expect all Earth-based future SF to contain at least a mention of climate-related apocalypse. (The lack of climate-related disaster in Station Eleven, for ex., which already contains a perfectly respectable pandemic apocalypse and has really no narrative need to pile another apocalypse on top of it, nonetheless still took me slightly aback.)
Anyway, I mention this because one of the things I most appreciated about Alastair Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth is the fact that it's a post-climate change novel that manages to be optimistic bout it. Reynolds' nearish-future could very easily have been a cyberpunkish dystopia -- civilization was nearly destroyed by unstoppable climate events! now there's an all-knowing panopticon that has everyone under surveillance all the time to prevent antisocial behavior! humans are undergoing dramatic genetic manipulation, like, ALL THE TIME! -- but instead, you know, humans are adaptable, they just keep rolling with it, North America and Europe are kind of irrelevant but Kenya is the one of the world's biggest economic powers now, that's cool! This is all actually very encouraging to read, so thank you, Alastair Reynolds.
The actual plot of Blue Remembered Earth is basically a sort of treasure hunt undertaken by two disaffected scions of a wealthy family of Kenyan industrialists -- Sunday, who's gone off to be a starving Bohemian artist in the surveillance-free Descrutinized Zone on the Moon, and Geoffrey, who uses his family's grant funds to do REALLY IN-DEPTH studies of elephants -- when they discover that their dead grandmother, brilliant explorer/entrepreneur/adventurer Eunice Akinya, has left them a set of CLUES scattered across the solar system.
Eunice Akinya -- cranky, brilliant, eccentric, and mostly represented in this book by a computer construct that Sunday's whipped up as a kind of bizarre coming-to-terms-with-your-famous-grandmother's-death art project -- is clearly the most interesting thing about the book. The other most interesting thing are the elephants. The elephant subplot was the most emotionally compelling thing for me BY FAR and I am not entirely happy with the end of it. (It's not awful or animal harm-ish! I am just sad about certain elephant-related choices that Geoffrey made that are not the choices I wanted him to make.) The treasure-hunt plot also lags after a while; Alastair Reynolds is not the world's most brilliant prose stylist.
That said, the worldbuilding is really fun and there's clearly a lot of thought put into it, and I can definitely see whysetsthingsright has been trying to sell me on Alastair Reynolds for years. I will probably be reading the sequels!
Anyway, I mention this because one of the things I most appreciated about Alastair Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth is the fact that it's a post-climate change novel that manages to be optimistic bout it. Reynolds' nearish-future could very easily have been a cyberpunkish dystopia -- civilization was nearly destroyed by unstoppable climate events! now there's an all-knowing panopticon that has everyone under surveillance all the time to prevent antisocial behavior! humans are undergoing dramatic genetic manipulation, like, ALL THE TIME! -- but instead, you know, humans are adaptable, they just keep rolling with it, North America and Europe are kind of irrelevant but Kenya is the one of the world's biggest economic powers now, that's cool! This is all actually very encouraging to read, so thank you, Alastair Reynolds.
The actual plot of Blue Remembered Earth is basically a sort of treasure hunt undertaken by two disaffected scions of a wealthy family of Kenyan industrialists -- Sunday, who's gone off to be a starving Bohemian artist in the surveillance-free Descrutinized Zone on the Moon, and Geoffrey, who uses his family's grant funds to do REALLY IN-DEPTH studies of elephants -- when they discover that their dead grandmother, brilliant explorer/entrepreneur/adventurer Eunice Akinya, has left them a set of CLUES scattered across the solar system.
Eunice Akinya -- cranky, brilliant, eccentric, and mostly represented in this book by a computer construct that Sunday's whipped up as a kind of bizarre coming-to-terms-with-your-famous-grandmother's-death art project -- is clearly the most interesting thing about the book. The other most interesting thing are the elephants. The elephant subplot was the most emotionally compelling thing for me BY FAR and I am not entirely happy with the end of it. (It's not awful or animal harm-ish! I am just sad about certain elephant-related choices that Geoffrey made that are not the choices I wanted him to make.) The treasure-hunt plot also lags after a while; Alastair Reynolds is not the world's most brilliant prose stylist.
That said, the worldbuilding is really fun and there's clearly a lot of thought put into it, and I can definitely see why
setsthingsright has been trying to sell me on Alastair Reynolds for years. I will probably be reading the sequels!
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Date: 2015-08-27 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-27 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-27 01:41 pm (UTC)Also all the ladies that get to Do Stuff. So many. Eunice is great and crotchety as hell.
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Date: 2015-08-27 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-27 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-27 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-28 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-28 02:50 am (UTC)...OK playboy is not actually accurate as far as I know, but everything else.
(I could be wrong but I can't actually remember any prominent white people in the book -- most of the cast is African with some Indian and Chinese side characters.)
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Date: 2015-08-28 03:25 pm (UTC)Cool, thanks!