Autumn

Suffers from narrator and front-loaded exposition

Revisado: 08-03-17

Unfortunately this narrator manages to make every character sound like an affronted grandmother, except for Lilia, who sounds like a country bumpkin from the Charlotte's Web cartoon movie. I tried so hard to look past this but nearly every line felt delivered counter to the intentions of the author. The best narrators manage to imbue some sense of the character's own personality to the tone, and this one simply doesn't. Every character sounds exactly the same and it makes it an active burden to tell who is who.

For the story itself, it's all very intriguing but takes so long to make sense through the cripplingly heavy exposition, lack of real character details, and the veritable onslaught of named characters.

I think I'll like this book better on a second read-through. Probably in print.

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Best narrator ever for this book

Revisado: 08-02-17

The narrator alone sells this book for me. I'd never heard of her before but she was an incredible for this story. I still can't get over it.

This is one of my favorite Reynolds books, and I've listened to them all. I don't know if it's objectively the best or not, but it blends the flavor of sci-fi he's known for with something new. Even his other single-POV books didn't really capture the character personality the way this one does.

If there's just one thing to say about the book, it's that this is easily Reynolds's best character-driven book ever.

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Pretty good, if a little YA-ish

Revisado: 08-02-17

I think the only thing sitting wrong with me about the book is that it's obviously hoping to hook you with 80s stuff but it's written like a YA novel, snarky protagonist and narration and all, which doesn't seem like the target audience. Unless, maybe today's YA boys and girls with an interest in old stuff is he target audience.

The beginning of this book could honestly ha e been written more interestingly, but if even if you think 3 and 1/2 hours of expository setup is too much, I do recommend you push through anyway. I think it's worth the effort, all things told.

The women in the book were just baaaarely on that line where I was having trouble deciding if they were well-written or not. My qualms are probably related to the YA style again, so I won't harp on the point.

There weren't many profound twists and turns--the big surprise near the final fight was pretty transparent to me since there were only so many ways it could go with the pieces in play.

Good story overall, not overly concerned with the nitty gritty details so much as the bigger world concept, but good anyway

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So sad I put off listening to this...

Revisado: 08-02-17

Honestly, I don't know anything about this universe, and while it was a little disorienting at first, it's so well written that I knew everything I needed to.

I was amazed at the writing quality. Like, damn.

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Hard to treat as gospel, but a good thinking tool

Revisado: 02-18-16

The biographical content here is actually quite good. When it comes to advice on the method of writing, you're probably best served by letting it inform your thought process, rather than use it as a template. Hopefully King's biases show through and you can discern them from the real meat of the discussion he's putting forward.

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Reads like it's lacking plot revisions

Revisado: 02-18-16

There's something admirably simple about this trilogy, especially when you zoom out and look at the romantic bird's eye view, but something about its storytelling method just doesn't sit right with me.

The trilogy was rendered for us as a long string of montages between rather sparse events. Time and attention went into every scene, but it's all just characters standing around, with no ability to act on what little information they have. Subplots spring up everywhere, and turn out to be completely pointless as soon as the story moves on. The only result is that the character personalities are colored just slightly. Even the events that are at the heart of the story come off strangely. A transmission sent across 70 lightyears just for fun apparently, a sabotage plot that exists for essentially no reason, and of course the centerpiece of the whole series, Poseidon itself, completely ignored by the cast, even at the culmination of events.

The only reason the story has any purpose at all is because Eunice's character regularly forces narrative on the reader in the form of random conjecture, covering topics such as the Watchkeepers, Poseidon and its wonders, what the Endbuilders's must have intended for the universe, their solution to a universe-scale issue, what Poseidon must represent for other species. As a reader, it's all so hollow that you start to see through it rather quickly.

This story, most of all, communicated the uniqueness of everyone's relationships with other characters, and there are a couple of magnificent scenes that were likely At the core of Reynolds's vision for the story, and yet somehow all of the characters come up short in my view. They all say the predictable thing. They all complain in the expected manner. They offer each other perfectly reasonable but highly mundane comforts. They seem to act and think in a contextual vacuum, as if every scene was written independently, somehow only vaguely influenced by events that literally just took place.

When the story is somehow most vulnerable and begging for plot advancement, it's given to us in some supremely bizarre anti-"deux ex machina", something that puts a wrench in the whole story just so that the story should go where Reynolds imagined it should. Mpose's role, Kanu's ship damaged around Poseidon, the use of nanomachinery, the sabotage plot, Eunice's ability to send a message across 70 ly of space and yet can't produce a signal strong enough to contact a ship in the same system, Eunice's alarmingly selective loss of memory any time she might actually be useful... all of it exists just to give texture to something that is frankly quite boring. These are all just loose ends that I guess Reynolds thought there was no reason to tie back into the story, and none of the characters seem to notice.

As a fan of Reynolds, I don't begrudge him the time and effort that he put into this trilogy. The idea for the whole thing must have been infectious, consuming his attention. Now that he's finished it, I'll be happy to see him turn to other stories.

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A Romantic Adventure

Revisado: 03-09-15

Great period romance from one of my favorite authors. The detail and poetry of the writing along with the measured performance of the narrator create a story which you can't help but visualize and which leaves me feeling as though I had watched a movie rather than listened to a book.

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Awkward to get into, but sturdy by the end

Revisado: 12-14-14

I jump at the opportunity to experience more of the Pandora's Star universe, and was pleased with the the opening scenes of this book.

After that, the story structure was pretty confusing, but eventually you have an opportunity to comprehend it. I was worried as I was 2/3s of the way through that this whole thing was just a feeble grab for Void-like storytelling with no clear bigger picture, but I was glad to discover that there is indeed a goal for this whole storyline. This story felt necessary to frame future events and make them feel connected to the bigger universe.

This book is a thing that is good as a whole, not necessarily because any given slice is a 5-star wonder. I do recommend it, but I suspect the followup stories will be the heavier hitters.

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You unfortunately probably want the print version

Revisado: 12-14-14

I think I'm pretty open minded, but sadly the audio performance on this story leaves a lot to be desired. It's a wonky combination of a story-bookish tone and missed nuances. The individual sentences are acted, instead of the scene or character as a whole.

I realized a few hours into this book that the narration was making me think less of Alistair Reynolds' storytelling ability. But when I imagined the scenes as acted by someone like John Lee, I realized the story could have felt so much more rich.

Instead of suspense, I felt apathy. Instead of urgency, I felt impatient. Instead of voice acting bringing personalities to life, I was repeatedly taken aback at how overly strong the accents were, including her use of unwritten, amazingly repetitive slurping inhales for the aquatics. The majority of dialog between characters intended for development instead feels flimsy because of the storybookishness tone. Everybody that isn't Russian or Southern-redneck uses the same African intonation, including the Japanese-named character (which got no special accent and is apparently African.)

I felt that the African style worked better in the first book. Despite my best efforts to enjoy the audiobook, I was constantly distracted by the audio medium. I frankly intend to repeat my experience of this story in print, in hopes that I can think more highly of the original text.

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Woah

Revisado: 07-03-13

This is a hugely satisfying story. Very emotionally powerful in those last several hours. That ending. This is going to be an incredible series.

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