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Don't mix up this author with Alyssa Cole

Revisado: 01-18-21

This writer, Alyssa B Cole, is a different person from Alyssa Cole, an African American writer of both historical and contemporary romances. My mistake. It is not ABC's fault that she isn't the same person and she of course has the right to use what I assume is her own name. So I will not criticize her for what she is not. Just alerting others who may also be confused. I went ahead and finished the book to give it a fair try. I will not be reading more books by this author.

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Great read/listen

Revisado: 10-24-20

I'm not usually a fan of thrillers and chose this only because I know Alyssa Cole's other work. It was a great read which I would recommend even to people who don't generally like thrillers. The suspense/danger elements are interwoven with snappy often funny dialog. As is typical in the thriller genre, the "what is going on" story goes over the top and builds to a violent climax, even as the general story underneath about what is happening is drawn from real issues of gentrification and displacement and racism. The book is written in first person with alternating chapters from the two protagonists, a Black woman and a White man, which is very effective in audio with two narrators. I appreciated Cole's work in the violent episodes to make sure her characters stayed human and cared about what they were doing. I'll be recommending this book to others.

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really good book

Revisado: 10-08-17

This is one of the best science fiction books I've read in a long time. It was both really interesting for its SCIENCE fiction, i.e. the depth with which it portrays both future technologies and how societies would evolve under certain conditions and for its portrayal of interesting characters whom you get to know and care about. The book is set a few thousand years in the future where humanity on Earth has planted a lot of colonies and developed terraforming technology, then produced environmental destruction that destroyed civilization and left only a fragment of humanity left. The book follows two interacting threads. One is humans out in space for centuries trying to find a place to live after Earth is wrecked. Unlike the comfortable living conditions and the warp drive of Star Trek, these people have to live with the constraints of light speed, a technology that allows some people to be put into stasis while machines or other people take care of things for a hundred years or so, and what would start happening after hundreds of years of this. The second is the evolution of society on a planet where the leftover high tech has created a situation where spiders, insects, and crustaceans evolve first sentience then technology. The detailed portrayal of the different kinds of societies that would be developed by different kinds of animals is thoughtful and fascinating.

The narration is good enough for the job and carries the story, but the occasional attempts to give characters distinctive accents or voices are inconsistent and, in general, all the characters sound alike when they are speaking.

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an epilogue to the Vorkosigan series

Revisado: 05-12-17

This book is only for fans of the series, it cannot stand alone. As others have said, there is no plot. Its purpose is to bring some closure to Cordelia's life and provide retrospective views on the past from another angle that takes Aral's bisexuality seriously.Too much of the first 2/3 of the book is devoted to recapitulating events from previous books in the series that would be known to readers of the series and serve no purpose except to tell readers who various characters are or what their backstories are, It explores the implications of reproductive technologies for bending generations. I love this series (and most of LMB's books) so I'm not sorry I read the book. It is kind of sad to see the Vorkosigans riding off into the sunset, but it looks like their story is over.

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good science fiction

Revisado: 02-12-17

This book is funny and very interesting on the for-real science fiction front, imagining what future technology would be. It has good human insights on what would happen if personalities were replicated. I enjoyed it and it zipped along as a read. But there was some superficiality to it as a novel, quite possibly because it was so panoramic. Excellent narrator.

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don't like it

Revisado: 08-18-13

I am among the minority who do not like this book; I'm only sticking with it because I paid for it. If you love the idea of a magical circus and magic being real and enjoy description of magical environments and effects, you may be among those who love the book. I'd prefer character development, human emotions, and/or a plot.

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read the powerpoint chapter on line

Revisado: 04-30-11

I agree with other reviewers -- this narrator is OK but not great. But it doesn't matter how great she is, the PowerPoint chapter (12, second to last) is a failure in audio. It it is worth timing your "reading" to be near a computer for it. The on-line version available at the author's web site is in color and includes sound clips from the songs that are referenced and is by far the preferred medium for this chapter. The black and white PDF available from audible is much less entertaining and captures less of the author's intent. The audio version collapses into boring nothingness for the last 3 slides in the PowerPoint -- they are graphs, and the narrator "reads" every data point! This is ten minutes of meaningless tedium. The producers of the audio book deserve a big fail for not coming up with a better solution to that.

As to the book, my response was meh through much of it. I could recognize her talent as a writer, but found it hard to really "get into" disjointed stories that were about different characters and hopped around in time. After I got to the end (including the PowerPoint chapter) I could see what she was about, and liked it better on reflection than as I was going through it.

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interesting information + incorrect extrapolations

Revisado: 02-27-11

This book intertwines some very interesting reporting on modern science of genetics & linguistics (which I enjoyed) with some uninformed, irritating and wordy/repetitive extrapolations to genetic explanations of culture (which made me feel like arguing). As one little example near the end of the book (hard to check references with an audio book), there is speculation that the difference between East Asian and West European ways of thinking is due to the difference between rice farming and the lives of ancient Greeks. But ancient Greeks are not a dominant element of European genes, as the book said earlier. There may be something to the "Asian rice farmer" idea, but the comparison has to be to the waring groups who dominated Europe until recently; an earlier passage on the "civilization" of Europe similarly ignores history. And the huge influence of Genghis Khan in the Eurasian gene pool (documented earlier in the book) similarly disappears in talking about possible influence of genes on culture. Overall, the cultural discussions follow this model: see a cultural pattern and make up a story about how genetics could have caused it. Or identify a genetic pattern and tell a story about its effects that confirms your prior cultural biases. Don't worry about internal contradictions between different parts of the book. Over-generalize across societies and ignore exceptions when you want to say that human genes cause a universal cultural trait and caricature cultural differences (and over-generalize within continents) when you want to make a racial difference argument. Totally ignore alternate explanations for the phenomena. On the genetic front, he talks as if genes have goals and purposes. But evolution is about statistical distributions.

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enjoyed this

Revisado: 10-18-09

I like Nick Hornby's other books and enjoyed this one. The alternation among narrators was very effective.

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