Mr Reed thinks big with a capital B. The Great Ship is the size of a gas giant, the time-scales involved are enormous and in The Well of Stars, the main adversary is the size of an entire gaseous nebula! The characters have a kind of casual, almost reckless immortality due to their advanced nanotechnology based medical technology, and they have lived for hundred of centuries.

The plot of this book didn’t hold up very well for me. Summary of the timeline (not how the plot is related in the book) (SPOILER!) :

• mean baby alien is banished into a nebula to die
• baby alien survives and grows into a huge, evil, monster – the Polypods
• a refugee from the ship is captured by the Polypods
• the refugee tells Polypods of the rumored creature living within the Great Ship
• Polypods decide to destroy the ship to unleash the creature within, and so undo creation and destroy their own past atrocities (?!?)
• the ship enters the nebula where the Polypods live
• the Polypods attack and almost destroy the ship
• the ship’s inhabitants learn of the Polypods history
• the ship’s inhabitants guilt the Polypod into calling off the attack, but it is too late as the Polypod weapon is already deployed
• some previously un-mentioned things (at least in this book) called the Bleak emerge and fight off the Polypods and take over the ship.
• cliffhanger left open…

The idea of the “stalled creation” of the universe that is the motivation for the Polypods made little sense to me. Also, the obviously intelligent Polypods’ single-minded obsession with the destruction of the universe based on the lies of a single man seemed implausible. With this being the primary conflict of the the book, it was hard to have much emotional attachment to the outcome. In this case, then it was just as well, as the ending is a cliffhanger non-ending that comes out of nowhere to squash a potentially much more satisfying tragic ending. Although once again, the idea of the Polypods being so susceptible to good old Catholic guilt seemed a bit much, and the emergence of the Bleak takes control of the plot totally out of the hands of all of the character in the book so far – a sin against the rules of story structure.

The Well of Stars isn’t bad, it has lots of interesting ideas, but maybe too many to explore meaningful in the space available.

This is very intense, detailed, and fascinating book. It is sometimes painful to read, even horrific, but it drew me back in over and over for the 766 pages. Strikingly original and powerful, it is a book that I will not forget.

I have a signed first edition hardcover of Mr Simmon’s Olympos from a signing at Book People in Austin, and he is an author that I consistently enjoy.

This book paints a typical Simmons large canvas, albeit in a physically tiny, cramped environment. The scope comes from the ensemble cast of the crew members. The crew are so tightly packed into each others lives for the duration of the voyage that they seem to become a single entity. Simmons writes chapters from the viewpoints of many of the different crew members, as if hte crew were a single person that expresses itself in a myriad of ways. As the crew members die, the extraneous emotions of this hypothetical multi-person are pared away – hope, dignity, stupidity and innocence are shaved off until just the core emotions remain in the form of the most basic and stubborn human motivations.

Bravo.

• boy lives in backwards, oppressed future society
• boy is special
• boy is visited by an avatar of some kind
• boys is afraid, and refuses to become involved
• something bad happens
• boy is forced into action
• boy becomes hero

I think I’ve ready this story before – except that in Anne McCaffrey’s books the hero is a girl instead of a boy. Check it out here – a book on how to write this story! Maybe Mr. Meaney used some software to write his book – even easier!

Maybe I’ll come back to it when I have nothing else to read.

Warning – spoilers below.

This book reads like a tribute to the venerable Robert A. Heinlein, one of the most respected science fiction writers of all time. To be honest I never read Heinlein when I was young, so I have no emotional connection from my past to this style of literature. I have tried to read Heinlein – but out of its original context, it feels very dated and even hokey to me compared to more modern science fiction.

Old Man’s War is more of the same. Scalzi uses the technique of lecturing the reader, which was used extensively by Heinlein, but the quality of these lectures and the conclusions that he draws seemed to be dubious most of the time. The situations were contrived as were the choices of what technologies function in his world and which don’t.

Things that annoyed me:

• Apparently, humans taste great. All the aliens in the galaxy seem to love the taste of human flesh.
• All soldiers have the same gun. Ever heard of diversity of forces? Different kits for different members of fighting force has been around for thousands of years.. but not in the future.
• Technologically advanced aliens have primitive cultures. Why do aliens always have better technology but inferior cultures to us lowly humans? The Consu have black-hole powered star-system shield, but they like to sacrifice themselves to false gods.
• Lectures with absurd conclusions. When a team of soldiers goes down to a planet where the colonists are dead, one of them get infected and killed. They wore no protective gear or took any quarantine precautions. The conclusion the author draws from this is that the galaxy holds dangers that we couldn’t possibly imagine. No! I can imagine a mask that stops you inhaling alien critters.
• Arbitrary limits on technology. According to the author, repairing the bodies of old people cannot be done – even though they can transfer souls between bodies and travel faster than light. Why? The bodies just wear out.. no reason given.

Too harsh?

For a better book in the same line-of-work, try When We Where Real, by William Barton, which of course is out of print.