Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children, #1)

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Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children #1)

3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 · rating details · 1,478 ratings · 219 reviews

BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH is the first volume in a monumental trilogy tracing the Akinya family across more than ten thousand years of future history...out beyond the solar system, into interstellar space and the dawn of galactic society.

One hundred and fifty years from now, in a world where Africa is the dominant technological and economic power, and where crime, war, disease...more

Hardcover, 512 pages

Published January 2012 by Orion Publishing Group

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Mar 13, 2013 Ric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Read my share of technical papers, as part of the day job. Concise, spare expositions that have data, assumptions, analysis and conclusions, all within the 7 page length limit. And I'll admit, sometimes my mind has wandered, placing these in stories fleshed with human participants and human emotions. One way to find more meaning in the cool things that science makes.

I'm back in that place, listening to the audiobook version of Blue Remembered Earth. Lots of cool stuff --- golem personalities, ne

...more

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Feb 18, 2012 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Much fuss in the SF publishing world has been made about the fact that in 2009 Alastair was given a large sum of money, allegedly £1 million, with his British publishers for ten books to be published over the next ten years. Though the steam-punky Terminal World was published in 2010, it seems that much of this advance was connected to this series, a hard SF tale of the emergence of Africa in the 22nd century as a superpower group of nations and Earth’s transcendence to the stars.

My initial thou...more Much fuss in the SF publishing world has been made about the fact that in 2009 Alastair was given a large sum of money, allegedly £1 million, with his British publishers for ten books to be published over the next ten years. Though the steam-punky Terminal World was published in 2010, it seems that much of this advance was connected to this series, a hard SF tale of the emergence of Africa in the 22nd century as a superpower group of nations and Earth’s transcendence to the stars.

My initial thoughts that such a scenario would lead to Alastair writing near-future travelogue-SF, in the manner of Ian McDonald or Paolo Bacigalupi, were a little worrying. I really wasn’t sure whether the idea would work.

I needn’t have worried, though. In a style more Peter F. Hamilton or Neal Asher than Ian McDonald, this is a brilliant tale that quickly removed my fears and won me over.

The story is focussed on Geoffrey, initially a young boy living in Africa with his sister Sunday and his grandmother Eunice. As the story develops we discover that the Akinya family are quite well-to-do, and in the rapidly changing global economy are clearly one of the groups to take advantage of Africa’s burgeoning new-found wealth and economic prosperity. At the beginning of the novel they have Asher-like implants to connect them to the AI global network, the Mechanism, with human-like simulacrums by the end. With an absence of war and famine, it soon becomes clear that Humanity’s future lies in expansion to the rest of the Solar System and beyond, something Geoffrey’s family are quick to take advantage of. They have made a considerable sum mining resources from the solar system, though Geoffrey is more interested in studying elephant psychology in Africa.

The death of Eunice leads to Geoffrey picking up for the family something Eunice left behind in a deposit box on the Moon. What he finds there leads to him unravelling a series of clues in order to discover a game-changing artifact. At this point I did have problems in trying to forget the film plot of Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure, but what such a premise really allows Alastair to do in an SF setting is take Geoffrey and Sunday on a Clarkean Grand-Tour of the Solar System (see Imperial Earth) visiting not only the Moon but also delving below Earth’s oceans, Mars and the Oort Cloud. It’s done well enough to make those thoughts of Nicolas Cage quickly disappear.

It is, in essence, a generational space-family-saga of the type quite common in the 1980’s and 90’s, (see, for example, Michael Flynn’s Firestar series) though where the focus then was often US based, this one is stridently African/Asian, reflecting current trends. Though I’m not convinced that the role of Europe and North America in future space exploration would be quite as low key as it is suggested here, it’s an interesting take. And there are reasons suggested in the novel as to why this is – hints of global catastrophes (both physical and technological) which might allow the dominance of those countries as a consequence.

Positively Clarkean in its optimistic perspective of future space exploration, this was a read I found difficult to put down. In some ways a pleasingly old-fashioned adventure story, there’s enough of a new spin here to make the tale worth reading.

Like Clarke though, the characterisation will be a little flat for some, though Geoffrey and Sunday are fairly well developed. To me, though, the real winner is the environment that the characters travel in. The places that we visit around the Solar System with Geoffrey and Sunday have a vivacity and a joy that make them of primary interest to the reader. We revel in the sense of place – weirdly different, yet oddly human. There’s surveillance on Earth, a disenfranchised group of people on the Moon, robots on Mars and people mining in the Oort Cloud. Alastair’s optimism shows that the human race has a diverse future.

This is Alastair taking on the likes of Clarke, or perhaps Ben Bova, Greg Bear and Stephen Baxter. Less galaxy-spanning than the Revelation Space universe, its focus on Earth and the solar system creates a more focused, thoughtful, engaging and interesting novel, though clearly its centre of attention will expand with later books in the series.

Whatever the critics may say, to my mind this book shows a writer who is worth the money invested, based on what I’ve read here. This is my favourite Alastair Reynolds to date, and I can’t wait to see where this series goes next. Recommended.(less)

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Nov 11, 2012 Rushi rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, science-fiction

"Blue Remembered Earth" is the first of a new series, Poseidon's Children, by Alastair Reynolds. Unlike his previous work in the Revelation Space series, this book is set in the Solar System. The main events of the book happen in the mid 22nd century as imagined by Mr. Reynolds. The book is also a departure in style from his previous work. It is lighter and more optimistic than any of the books in the Revelation Space series. The work is more character driven and has fewer information dense "har...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

Imaginative at times, but mostly plays out like a game of cat and mouse that eventually has no bearing whatsoever on the overarching plot of the story.

There are many cool ideas buried in here (A planet found bearing signs of artificial life, for example!), but 98% of the story revolves around the politics of a few family members. I didn't exactly find this riveting, or even particularly entertaining.

I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that Alastair Reynolds has managed to produce...more

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Apr 19, 2013 Outis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, politics, transhumanism

Considering the plot is basically an excuse to show off Reynolds' vision, BRE has no right to be anywhere as engaging as it is.
Look at the basic synopsis: how interesting could this be, really? I was planning to read few chapters occasionally in preparation for the upcoming sequel. I failed.
Though the pretty silly plot wasn't as dull as I feared, the real attractions were the setting, how it shaped the characters' motivations and how both conspired to steer the plot's conflicts in unconventional...more Considering the plot is basically an excuse to show off Reynolds' vision, BRE has no right to be anywhere as engaging as it is.
Look at the basic synopsis: how interesting could this be, really? I was planning to read few chapters occasionally in preparation for the upcoming sequel. I failed.
Though the pretty silly plot wasn't as dull as I feared, the real attractions were the setting, how it shaped the characters' motivations and how both conspired to steer the plot's conflicts in unconventional directions. This stuff gave the book some real-world relevance. Also, elephants! I was blindsided by how cool the elephant stuff turned out to be.
The book is well-written for my taste in this genre (different genres require less functional writing). Some descriptions of bizarre stuff were stumbling blocks however.
Some readers evidently didn't fully understand the plot but I don't think they missed much. I was rather unimpressed by the resolutions of the mysteries (except when they involved elephants). As far as I'm concerned they served their purpose but weren't the point of the book.

There are two streaks running through BRE: serious and silly. On the one hand, Reynolds showcased glitzy and implausible concepts (the happenings in Tiamaat would be a case in point). On the other hand, the social consequences of the intergration of some of today's emerging technologies in people's daily lives are explored, often in an understated fashion. You get glimpses of the setting's social alienness from news headlines and the like. You also get a glimpse of the consequences of climate change and resource bollenecks. And Reynolds' techno-cornucopian vision is rather unconventional, making it worth examining.
Also in the serious department, people in this setting are driven by prosperity and security to face some rather existential questions. For the most part, these aren't rooted in abstract speculations but in practical issues arising from physical and technical limitations. Reynolds is known for having a (relatively) realistic approach to space travel and its military applications which really shines here. Though it all seems very unlikely now, it's not inconceivable that some of these issues might drive social conflicts in our future.
Individual characters too are for the most part driven in ways we can relate to. While there are some caricatures and some colorfully silly characters, there are few action heroes or villains (something which seems to have frustrated some readers) and many characters are either invested in or searching for ways to give meaning to their long and secure lives. You get a sense that most of their contemporaries are happy playing technologically sophisticated social games so we must be meeting outliers in this book. While humanity is clearly at a crossroads, even our outliers often seem appropriately jaded and the big issues are usually only indirectly reflected in their pet projects and changeable goals. The two main things I didn't think were appropriate were the characters' shortsighted reaction to the book's biggest reveal and the bizarre prevalence of prejudices about non-human intelligence (considering the existence of regulations and even of an enforcement body).
Of note are the extensive use of threats, reckless endangerment and "non-weapons" in conflicts instead of actual violence as well as how seriously characters take legal issues. This is refreshing in a genre overloaded with macho fantasies but it must have annoyed some readers.

For the benefit of hard SF fans: relative to the stated goals of this series, the setting is not all that plausible. That said, it easily beats most settings of the genre of course (including Reynold's own work).
The setting's economics do seem to make sense which is unusual. The constraints of thermodynamics do seem to have been lifted for the benefit of some of the most silly stuff though. And infosec techniques are predictably gimmicky and implausible. That's unfortunate because they're frequently brought up in the narrative.
Using an unexpected offhand mention of a hammer and a sickle as an excuse, I like to think of the setting as the product of an alternate history which makes it a good bit more plausible since some of the biggest issues are what is supposed to have happened in the mid-21st century.

I was disappointed by the bomb Reynolds dropped on his carefully constructed setting. It drives the plot (although you aren't told about the bomb early in the book, much less about its connection to the plot) and dials up the stakes but I thought that was unnecessary. The relatively mundane setting was the main reason I liked the book.
I'm not sure it augurs well for the sequel either. I was hoping for something more subtle than the bomb seems to hint at. We'll just have to see...(less)

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Apr 17, 2013 Tim Hicks rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

There are better five-star books, but that didn't stop me. It's large, jammed with ideas, and tells an engaging story. Most of all, I enjoyed reading it.

It would be unfortunate to expect this to be like other Reynolds works. It's more like a book from one of the established stars of 30 years ago. I've read a lot of those, and maybe that's why I liked this.

What Reynolds adds is a wonderful casualness about all the whizbang technology, and an offsetting realism in areas where there has NOT been...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Jane rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: hard science fiction readers, space opera fans, Alastair Reynolds fans

Shelves: science-fiction

To summarize very quickly, Blue Remembered Earth was better than Century Rain and Terminal World, but nowhere near as captivating as Pushing Ice, House of Suns or the Revelation Space novels. So far. I realize it’s just the first book of a series that’s going to span 11,000+ years of human space travel, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

There are spoilers below, so if you'd prefer not to be spoiled, stop reading now.

I began to really enjoy the book, eventually, after Geoffrey Akinya makes the tr...more To summarize very quickly, Blue Remembered Earth was better than Century Rain and Terminal World, but nowhere near as captivating as Pushing Ice, House of Suns or the Revelation Space novels. So far. I realize it’s just the first book of a series that’s going to span 11,000+ years of human space travel, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

There are spoilers below, so if you'd prefer not to be spoiled, stop reading now.

I began to really enjoy the book, eventually, after Geoffrey Akinya makes the trip to Tiamaat and learns about Arachne and Mandala from Arethusa. No one can really write about Mars with the passion that Reynolds does (except maybe Kim Stanley Robinson) so I enjoyed the trip to Mars and the excursion into the Evolvarium. It comes through in his prose and in his characters.

As an author he gets a lot of criticism for poor character development. I'm the last person to criticize...I’ve never been as interested in a character as I am with a concept, but Geoffrey Akinya might shut those critics up for a while. I even teared up when Memphis died, because I’d begun to like the character on a really personal level igss. That’s only ever happened with one other Reynolds character: Neville Clavain.

Sunday was by far my favorite. A character I never expected to like but quickly took a shine to was the ill-fated Gribelin. His final act was surprisingly selfless.

That said, though, Reynolds is still a misogynist writer and a slow-builder. That’s probably why it took me 100+ pages before I started to care about Eunice’s convoluted treasure-hunt. I figured out early on that she was still alive (and that she’d pulled a Voyager I & II and gone trans-Neptunian space), and I figured the artilect research was being done side-by-side with research into exotic propulsion (the kind of thing Reynolds is famous for). In fact, I think it was when June mentioning the falling out with Li Wei that got me thinking along those lines.

I'm sure I can wait patiently for the next book. I especially want to know where and how the unorthodox Pans and their ideology will fit in further down the line.(less)

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Dec 05, 2012 Dylan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Honestly i believe Reynolds to be one of the greatest sci-fi writers of the last decade. His twin astrophysicists countryman; Peter Hamilton -the other. And so it came to a shock with how bored I was with Blue Remembered Earth. The beautiful imagination that shaped his other classics seems gone as Reynolds has the reader follow his boring character through a fated life in the near future where Africa is an interstellar powerhouse. Gone too is the hard science that made Reynolds universe so beaut...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Cthonus rated it 4 of 5 stars

The most annoying thing about Alastair Reynolds books is just how good they are... I've yet to come across a corker or one that merely manages to tick the box next to 'pretty good'.

They are, on the whole, inventive, well-plotted, and given their SF backdrop populated by rounded and utterly believable characters - no matter the number of limbs, wings or mechanical protheses.

Blue Remembered Earth is set partially in Africa and concerns a family of primarily African heritage. Given in the postface...more

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Aug 23, 2012 JBradford rated it 5 of 5 stars

I don’t hardly ever give 5 stars to a work of fiction, but I’ve done it at least three times this year and here’s another. I selected this book because I had a free book coming to me and I got sold on the write-up describing this as the first in a new series that would span a thousand years or so of a family’s history; I had just finished the Earth’s Children series, and I am a very strong fan of David Webber’s Safehold series, so this seemed a natural step.

This novel spans more than a lifetime...more I don’t hardly ever give 5 stars to a work of fiction, but I’ve done it at least three times this year and here’s another. I selected this book because I had a free book coming to me and I got sold on the write-up describing this as the first in a new series that would span a thousand years or so of a family’s history; I had just finished the Earth’s Children series, and I am a very strong fan of David Webber’s Safehold series, so this seemed a natural step.

This novel spans more than a lifetime, but the actual action takes place within just a few months, so there must be going to be a lot of novels in the series? The thing is, this is science fiction at its best, hard science fiction, written by a professional astronomer who must have figured out he was not going to get rich looking at the stars, so he decided to write about them. If I had not read an awful lot of science fiction when I was younger, this book would be unfathomable, and I cannot imagine some of my friends getting through it. The concepts are way out there, so that the made-up words that don’t mean anything have to be understood by context, but it works. Time will tell whether the other novels yet to come will be as good, but this one is excellent.

The book’s main protagonist is one Geoffrey Akinya, one of the members of an African family that has made a great deal of wealth from space exploration, mostly as the direct result of his grandmother’s intelligence and business enterprise. Geoffrey has no inters tint he family-run business, however, leaving that up to his manipulative cousins while he studies elephants. His sister, Sunday, has also turned her back on the family, preferring to eke out an existence as an artist on the back side of the moon. Everything is going well until the old family retainer who practically raised Sunday and Geoffrey by himself comes with a report that the grandmother, who has been living as recluse in her spaceship in a Mars orbit for the past sixty years, has passed away. The various members of the family come together for the ritual of scattering her ashes, and then the business-oriented cousins come up with a strange request. There is an anomaly in the financial records, in that the grandmother had been paying for a bank vault in one of the cities on the Moon all these years, and they want Geoffrey to go check it out, feeling there would be too much took if either one of them made that trip but no one would care if he did, as it would seem that he was must visiting his sister. What he finds in the bank vault leads him to Mars, however, and soon Sunday is as involved in the expanding adventure as he is—an adventure that takes Geoffrey much further than he ever expected to go.

Some side comments. I had read at least two hundred pages when I realized that the book not only was replete with British spellings but also was using single quotes around conversational dialog, which I had never seen before. There are several terms that may actually reflect the names of scientists whose end-products are being described, but I have not taken the time to look them up to see if that is so. I am really looking forward to the next book in the series … but I am rather certain, unfortunately, that I will not live long enough to read the last one.
(less)

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Jun 11, 2012 RBSD rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Despite much pretentious band wagon jumping by armchair critics to pan the book; despite a curious lull towards the end of an otherwise excellent book; despite all the obvious tropes, cliches and well worn paths, this is still a good book.

While not space-opera galaxy spanning scale, the book encompasses much, and much of it is novel, well written, and (for me endearingly) optimistic. Personally I'm fu**ed off (yes I swore) with the current crop of apocalyptica. If I want anxiety, and fear, I nee...more

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Apr 09, 2012 David Gillanders rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excellent sci fi from Reynolds. A slightly smaller scale than Reynolds earlier work. This one only covers about 120 years or so and only takes place within our solar system, rather than the galaxy spanning distances and 1000's of years that his other books are prone to.

One lovely element is the bright and colourful scenes in an Africa of the future. This is Africa that has emerged from famine and civil war in the 22nd century to become a major space faring federation of nations and a major space...more

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Mar 20, 2012 Kerry Hennigan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Blue Remembered Earth, with its rather breath-taking cover art, is the first novel I have read by Alastair Reynolds, and the first new, bumper SF volume I have tackled in a long, long time. Given that my favourite SF consists of classic John Wyndham and Robert Silverberg titles, this new novel was a challenge.

Blue Remembered Earth follows members of the Akinya dynasty, specifically in this case Geoffrey and Sunday, as they go on what can best be described as a treasure-hunt throughout the solar...more

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Feb 26, 2012 Lars J. Nilsson rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have to date read all of Alistair Reynolds books (at least I think I have, he is after all rather prolific). So. I'm a fan.

I've always seen him as slightly uneven though, and although a brilliant story-teller, not always the perfect craftsman, and his characterization leaves at times things to which for.

(Usual self-repeat: I won't cover the story in this review, plenty of others do).

So let's start with the major let down: characterization. The main character (Geoffrey) starts out a whining...more

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Feb 22, 2012 Gerhard rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

This reminded me of Mike Resnick and Stephen Baxter (Manifold series). Given the popularity of dystopias that grapple head-on with current problems, like Wind-Up Girl, Reynolds takes as a starting point the unpopular notion that technology will solve all our problems. When this novel opens, over-population, global warming, HIV/Aids have all been relegated to history, while the Internet has expanded to a benevolent, solar system-wide Surveilled World charged with saving humanity from its own wors...more

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Aug 07, 2012 Alexander Popov rated it 4 of 5 stars

(Originally published on my blog: http://mybiochemicalsky.wordpress.com...)

In The History of Science Fiction Adam Roberts writes, after Heidegger, that “technology, from windmills to hydroelectric plants, “enframes” the world in a certain way, allowing or shaping the ways in which we “know” the world around us.” Consequently, the science in science fiction is not much different from a classic thought experiment, an exercise in imagining our possible worlds and their technologically-defined archi...more

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Jul 01, 2012 Rusty rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well - I waiting two years for it, that was a lot of time to build some anticipation. Alastair Reynolds became my favorite Science Fiction author somewhere along the line of 6 or 7 years ago. I read Revelation Space almost immediately upon its release - and loved it - but at the time it was just one book out of many that I loved. Somewhere along the way, I don't know when, I noticed that I was getting quite a thrill out of all his books. He has that rare gift of exploring some fantastic science...more Well - I waiting two years for it, that was a lot of time to build some anticipation. Alastair Reynolds became my favorite Science Fiction author somewhere along the line of 6 or 7 years ago. I read Revelation Space almost immediately upon its release - and loved it - but at the time it was just one book out of many that I loved. Somewhere along the way, I don't know when, I noticed that I was getting quite a thrill out of all his books. He has that rare gift of exploring some fantastic science fictional thought experiments AND creating compelling characters that I actually care about.

That is a big deal to me, should be to most genre fans. His consistency in putting out quality stories time and time and again have endeared him to me like no other author in the last 20 years.

I've known about this novel for a while, it's the first of a trilogy of books to cover the future history of humanity for the next 20 or 30 thousand years, I think. Sounds great to me. I'm signed up and ready to go.

The first book in this trilogy is about the relatively near future (say, 150 years, give or take) and I kept reading page after page, waiting for something to happen. It took a VERY long time to get a sense of what the plot of this novel. At its heart, this novel is a a mystery. A brother and sister that have to uncover the clues left behind by their reclusive and enigmatic grandmother after she passes away and embroil themselves deeper and deeper into a world changing discovery that has the major powers of the solar system falling all over themselves in the race to discover what's happening first.

Sounds cool, and it is. I liked the book. However, it reads like one part travelogue, one part mystery, one part sci fi novel. With a lot of the travelogue. Too much.

I enjoyed several of Ben Bova's Grand Tour novels, as well as a few other stand along books by authors that spend a great deal of time exploring the planets or moons of the solar system during their tales. Stephen Baxter's Titan and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mar's books come to mind right away.

So again, I found myself thinking that this was all ground we've covered before, and the whole chase the grandmother put the grandchildren on seems a bit, well, silly. I wanted more. And I don't mean I wanted the book longer, I wanted more within the pages I already had in front of me. Something was missing.

All told, the book does have some revelations at the end, and all the sub-plots get their resolution, I was surprised by a thing or two, so this did hit all the marks. It's a good novel, I loved the concept of the Evolvarium and some of the other technologies and political landscape of the future.

If you're a fan you should enjoy it. If you're a newbie to this author I'd recommend some of his other works first, the aforementioned Revelation Space novels, my personal favorite, House of Suns, or even Century Rain or Pushing Ice, all of which were fantastic I thought.

This one though, it serves as a great opening to a new universe. But it feels like an opening act. I suspect that this one was played pretty close to the vest by the author, I'm thinking he's saving the mind blowing stuff for the rest of the trilogy.(less)

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Feb 12, 2012 Bane of Kings rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: space-opera, 2012-releases-read, notable-2012-releases, 25-best-2012-releases

Original Post: http://thefoundingfields.com/2012/02/...

I’ve never read anything by Alastair Reynolds before, despite owning a copy of Galactic North, one of his anthologies. However, with his latest release of Blue Remembered Earth, I thought that now would probably be the best time to start reading his work.

And I must say that I found Blue Remembered Earth to be fantastic. Original world-building, (A/N: Original from what I’ve seen) interesting plot and well-rounded characters, Reynolds’ latest...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Burgoo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

It’s strange to think of a story spanning the solar system to be intimate, but in many ways that’s how this felt. Its primary focus is on a family mystery, grandchildren trying to unravel the legacy and mystery of their grandmother’s life. There are eventually implications for the entire system, but primarily their objectives and motivations are personal.
Reynolds develops a wonderful sense of the push & pull of life. Our protagonists, Geoffrey and Sunday, try to pull away from their family,...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Daniel Brandon rated it 4 of 5 stars

First, the positive: Alastair Reynolds is very good at a particular form of hard-core speculative fiction. That's not to say that it's necessarily hard scifi, but just that he can take a single speculative concept (in this book, it's mostly an advanced form of telepresence) and extrapolate it into a plausible and realistic future. It's handled very well in this book, in several different plausible ways and contexts.

Now, the negative. This book is based in a future "Africa," with "African" protag...more First, the positive: Alastair Reynolds is very good at a particular form of hard-core speculative fiction. That's not to say that it's necessarily hard scifi, but just that he can take a single speculative concept (in this book, it's mostly an advanced form of telepresence) and extrapolate it into a plausible and realistic future. It's handled very well in this book, in several different plausible ways and contexts.

Now, the negative. This book is based in a future "Africa," with "African" protagonists. In the afterword, Reynolds tries to explain why he chose to do this, and he gives two reasons. The second reason is that he likes African music, and listened to a lot of it while writing the book. The first is a slightly cavalier, "Why not?"

Dear Mr. Reynolds; if you decide to write a book set in a culture that is not your own, it might behoove you to do a little research in the process. I can't accuse him of getting anything wrong, because with the exception of a few place names, there really wasn't anything "African" about any of the book. In fact, you could have simply swapped out the "African" names with "Indian" ones, and the book would have been exactly the same, up to and including the elephant-related sub-plot. All of the attitudes, cultural constructs, and environments struck me as being profoundly and fundamentally first-world Western. North American, or British, or probably even French or German or Swedish for all I know. After writing a book where the characters occasionally make a big deal about being "African!", it was kind of jarring to not see any actual identifiable African elements. This is why the book doesn't get all five stars from me-- it's a small thing in some respects, but Reynolds managed to keep this niggling irritation front and center for several hundred pages worth of book, and that really started to wear on me by the end.

The roundup: Characters are reasonably well-developed. Not superbly deep and complex, but also far from two-dimensional cutouts. Plot is tight and well-paced, and not too predictable. Twists and turns are well revealed and emerge organically from earlier information. Dialog is serviceable-- hardly high marks for witty banter, but that's not what the book's about, so it isn't missed. Setting is well developed and realized, with the caveat of my earlier complaint.(less)

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Dec 11, 2012 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

Actual rating: 2.5 stars.

A potboiler with a humanity-spreads-its-wings theme, filled with hard sic-fi babble about nanotech and human/machine interfacing. The future societies and governments Reynolds describes are quite creepy, built around pervasive electronic surveillance of the population backed up by psycho-mechanical limits on individual human behavior: solar system-wide communitarianism gone mad. There is one small surveillance-free zone on the dark side of the Moon, and, frankly, I found...more

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Jun 18, 2012 William rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

Blue Remembered Earth, a suitably beautiful name for a wonderfully beautiful book. Blue Remembered Earth sets a firm foundation for the Poseidon's Children trilogy.

The plot starts out slow as the background of the universe and the characters themselves are introduced. Once it gets going, you cannot stop it. As the plot propels itself towards its mysteries, elements from Reynolds' other works such as Pushing Ice and Terminal world can be seen. The book sets up an expectation, not just for the con...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Ante Vukorepa rated it 3 of 5 stars

Most, if not all of Reynolds' work is like clockwork. There is never a single page that makes it feel like the author isn't in complete control of the story, background, characters and plot progression. His books are, for the most part, and especially the more involved world-building ones, like a Salvador Dali painting where not everything might make sense in the first few pages, but has an absolute and well planned reason and meaning behind it and is depicted realistically in all its aspects, n...more Most, if not all of Reynolds' work is like clockwork. There is never a single page that makes it feel like the author isn't in complete control of the story, background, characters and plot progression. His books are, for the most part, and especially the more involved world-building ones, like a Salvador Dali painting where not everything might make sense in the first few pages, but has an absolute and well planned reason and meaning behind it and is depicted realistically in all its aspects, no matter how fantastic it might seem at a first glance.

Blue Remembered Earth is - well - not like that. It's jumbled up. It's messy. It's incoherent. It gives you hope you will find some deeper driving logical thread underneath it at every corner, but never delivers. The characters act and behave like deranged puppets. Concepts are explored, then deserted before they come to any sort of satisfactory fruition. Reveals are disappointing and bland. In short - there's much to dislike.

Is it a bad book? Not in the least. It deserves praise for dispensing with all the semi-scientific world-building nonsense that will look as absurd in 30-40 years as the visions of future from the 50s look now. It sticks to elements that are completely plausible as a vision of our (near) future, although a somewhat utopic one. It drifts from that in places, but never so much as to make things completely unbelievable and implausible, and enough to make things interesting. The overarching theme is also commendable - books outlining humanity's first struggles into starfaring in a believable way are few.

Is it, however, a typical Reynolds book? Not in the least. If anything, it reads like something a younger, inexperienced, wide-eyed Reynolds might've written. Not that i know what a younger, inexperienced, wide-eyed Reynolds would've written, but hey - i can imagine it would've been something like this. Is it a disappointment? Knowing it's Reynold's work - yes, it is in the end. Is it bad? Not in the least. Should you read it? Heck yes.(less)

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Apr 24, 2013 SciFi Kindle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A great piece of Hard SF that keeps 'inside the lines' of the usual Space Opera tech tropes: no FTL or post-scarcity, transhuman society here, just perfectly plausible science your high school Physics teacher would approve. The magic comes in the human element of a family unraveling a long-held secret from the recently deceased family matriarch. Nowhere are our allies closer or enemies as ruthless as in our own families, and Reynolds' protagonists find themselves squaring off with their own cous...more A great piece of Hard SF that keeps 'inside the lines' of the usual Space Opera tech tropes: no FTL or post-scarcity, transhuman society here, just perfectly plausible science your high school Physics teacher would approve. The magic comes in the human element of a family unraveling a long-held secret from the recently deceased family matriarch. Nowhere are our allies closer or enemies as ruthless as in our own families, and Reynolds' protagonists find themselves squaring off with their own cousins as rivals for her legacy. Everyone's motivations are perfectly justified, and the reasonableness of it all perhaps contributes to the underwhelming notion of stakes in the story's conflicts. "Blue Remembered Earth" reminded me in many ways of Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312" more than Reynold's other work; the entire scope of the setting is within the solar system, where human settlements are pioneering along. The time scales are measured in decades and single lifetimes, and not the cosmic epochs and multi-system societies of Reynold's "Revelation Space" series. Another unique aspect of the book was the twist of placing global dominance not in Euro- or American-centric cultures, or even a Chinese one, but instead in a post-climate change Africa, where a new renaissance has taken place. Swahili is the new English. Pervasive internet access and surveillance grant telepresence in 'proxy' robotic bodies, as well as a nearly crime-free society. Some readers may be surprised that only 3 times in the book, and all of those in the final third of the story, is there any violent action. The story follows a rather civil quest along several stops that illustrate humanity's interplanetary spread. It is at its strongest when the environments are the most exotic; Mars' 'Evolvarium' or the undersea city of the Panspermian Initiative. The worldbuilding in Reynold's near future is quite imaginative, with many original ideas. However, I did find the action and suspense sequences weaker than expected. I understand the forthcoming books of the trilogy will follow the future history begun here for another 10,000 years, and I look forward to seeing what Reynolds does with the larger canvas.(less)

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Aug 30, 2012 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars

Let's start with the good:

1. Reynolds follows his usual, measured approach to technological advancement to some interesting ends.
2. There are a dearth of books that start with humanity puttering around the solar system that don't people warping or worm-holing across the galaxy by chapter 4.
3. Giving the nature of the trilogy the next book may be much better.

Now the bad:

I found the book to just be meh with lots of components that seem poorly planned or undeveloped. The characters are more cliched...more

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Sep 26, 2012 Paul Lunger rated it 4 of 5 stars

Alastair Reynolds's latest novel "Blue Remembered Earth" is part mystery & space adventure in the science fiction realm. When Geoffrey Akinya's grandmother Eunice dies he is sent away from his research into elephant cognition back to the Moon to deal with the family business. What he finds in a safe deposit box sends members of he & members of his family on a quest to find out exactly who she was & what she really left behind. Reynolds's story is very well written & as each succe...more

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Mar 14, 2013 Karl rated it 5 of 5 stars

Reynolds has sold me on modern (and hard) science fiction, plain and simple. While his previous works I've read have tended to show humanity's future as... messy, to say the least, this takes a more positive look at our near future (while humanity lets environmental issues such as global warming get calamitous before taking action, that action is decisive and spawns a period of unprecedented advancement, not to mention shift in global politics).

The story mostly jumps between two protagonists, G...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Lianne Burwell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf, library, ebooks

While I've seen Alastair Reynolds' name in the past, this is the first of his books that I've actually read, and I will certainly keep a closer eye on him in the future.

The Akinya business empire, started by the matriarch Eunice, is powerful based on industries started by her time in space, and now she has died. The heads of the business, Hector and Lucas, have discovered that she kept a box at a bank on the moon, and worried about possible skeletons ion the closet, they send their reluctant cou...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Sammy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

I'm not much of a sci-fi reader, so this review is probably woefully naive, but: this book was somewhat awesome.

Reynolds nicely balances the various elements of the book. The story is a mystery of sorts, as two siblings uncover their grandmother's amazing secrets. It's also an adventure, a conspiracy tale, and a gripping look at a future all too possible. Reynolds has a wonderful grasp of the scientifically possible and probable, but also conjures up a world that is cleverly imagined. I don't kn...more

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Jan 31, 2012 Justin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

Enjoyable and familiar start to a new series from Reynolds. Having read all of his previous work, it was easy to recognise his previous themes and scenarios playing out in Blue Remembered Earth, albeit on a smaller scale (certain chapters bared more than a passing resemblance to Absolution Gap and The Prefect in particular). The world here is more recognisable than anything he's given us previously and the use of Africa as the story's anchor is an interesting one - space elevators and the Kilima...more

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About Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds, former scientist and now full-time writer. Most of what he writes is science fiction, with a strong concern for scientific verisimilitude (although he is prepared to break the rules for the sake of a good story). He has lived in England, Scotland and the Netherlands where he worked as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency until 2004, but now makes his home back in his...more

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Quotes from Blue Remembered Earth

“How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’

‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.” — 5 people liked it

“I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory.” — 4 people liked it

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