This is one rather large book but, thankfully, it’s one rather good book as well that keeps those pages turn, turn, turning.

I think my only complaint is that when Volyova uses the Nostalgia for Infinity as a murder weapon by accelerating it and braking it in order to smash one of her crew to death, there’s no explanation as to what happened to everything else in this massive ship that wasn’t nailed down properly.   Like, what happened to all the ship-slime, rats, shuttle craft, the weapons cache and many other things besides: were all of the these things nailed down to protect them against such repeated high G acceleration and forward braking phases?   There were many ways of carrying out this killing that didn’t require any further explanation, but to use the method that Volyova did and then for Alastair to just fail to explain what happened to everything else in the ship does annoy me somewhat.

Because the ship isn’t designed to brake in the forward motion.   It’s designed to accelerate to one G continuously up to the half way point of the journey, then it will flip 180 degrees and use the same one G thrust to slow itself down.   Why would the engines suddenly be capable of huge 10 G burns in both directions just to kill one person?   I really think it’s needs a proper explaining.

But yeah, i know, that’s how picky i have to be to find any real criticism of this immense book.   It is the only fault i could find, and to be fair, most people would probably read this and not even think about it.

I do hope that doesn’t put anyone off (not that i think for one moment that it would ), because other than that one bizarre murder it’s super good, great writing, great characters, everything as we’ve come to expect so far in this series.

And i look forward to some more: next up is Nightingale.

Alastair’s Page

#scifi #sfmasterworks #alastairreynolds