@Edward, I see your point and now that I've finished the novel, I'm okay with Sarasti being there. The author played up the significance more in the second half (although I still think it's a stretch--can you really trust a predator with your fate?--but I can overlook).
@Simon, better late than never. This is a great book.
Overall, I think Blindsight was a fantastic book and I wouldn't hesitate to pick up another of Peter Watts' books, just for the writing style alone. I love how he weaved in so much scientific explanation without resorting to infodumping. Watts really thought this through, which I think is great. And such creative aliens!! I agree with some other people that you don't get the warmest fuzzies from the characters, but I still liked and enjoyed them. I thought they were very well characterized individuals. I also feel like I need to read it again. There's SO much packed into that novel, I'm sure I missed stuff. ]]>
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Cheryl
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 42 |
| correct: | 29 (69.0%) |
| skipped: | 18 |
| best streak: | 6 |
| questions added: | 0 |
bookshelves: sf
Time travel is usually left in the hands of science fiction writers with large machines that make all sorts of noises and flash various lights, but Tim Powers invokes ancient magic to spin an intriguing tale of time travel that leaves all that complicated science in the dust.
Imagine that time is like a river flowing beneath a layer of ice. No one can fight the current carrying you forward, nor can you bust a hole through the ice to escape it. But during the course of history "…something happened to punch holes in the metaphorical ice cover. Don't ask me how it happened, but spread out across roughly six hundred years there's a shotgun pattern of gaps, in which certain normal chemical reactions don't occur, complex machinery doesn't work…But the old systems we call magic do."
The millionaire J. Cochran Darrow has discovered how to pinpoint where and when these gaps will occur. He enlists the help of Brendan Doyle, an expert on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to take a group of paying tourists back to London in 1810 to listen to a Coleridge lecture. But, of course, things are never what they seem, as Darrow has an ulterior motive, or go as planned. Doyle gets grabbed by a group of dark magicians who demand to know how these people used the time gates and while he manages to escape, he doesn't make it back to the gap before it closes. He gets stuck in 1810 without knowing when the next gap will open.
The Anubis Gates is one of those novels that snowballs out of control and just when you think the situation can't get any worse for our hero Doyle, it just gets worse. This novel is so clever and intricate in its plotting that as a writer, I admit to a twinge of jealousy even while I was enjoying every second. Powers' use of real historical characters is also original while creating some new ones that intertwine effortlessly into this version of history.
One of those fictional "historical" characters that plays the biggest role in the novel is William Ashbless, a poet whose life events is a mystery and one Doyle has been desperately searching for historical documentation on to write a book. The "real" Ashbless was invented in the 1970s by Tim Powers and James Blaylock in reaction to what they felt was poor quality poetry being published in their school magazine. They wrote absurd free verse poetry to submit under the Ashbless pseudonym, but their plan backfired. Their poetry was enthusiastically received.
In the early 1980s, Powers wrote The Anubis Gates and Blaylock wrote The Digging Leviathan. Both novels contained the fictional Ashbless character they created, but they were unaware of each other's use until the editor for both books noticed and suggested they compare notes to be consistent. From there, Powers and Blaylock released a few books of Ashbless' "poetry" and even published a replica of his signature, the first name signed by one author, the last name by the other.
I mention William Ashbless in detail because I wish I had known the background of the character before I read the novel, but even knowing after the fact makes The Anubis Gates that much better. Ashbless is by far the most interesting of the zany cast of characters Powers creates for the novel.
Time travel stories are a particular favorite of mine, but having written all that praise, I must also point out that it took a good hundred pages before I really got into the novel. The problem was that the protagonist's situation and health gets so bad as he tries to survive in 19th century London without money or a past that I began to get bored. Would it ever end? But just as I was getting bored, the pace picks up. About half way through the book, it becomes clear why the author sent this protagonist through so much hardship (and with a jaw dropping twist I should have seen coming that gets him out of the deteriorating situation), but I feel Powers could have shortened up the early section. However, those extra pages of reading are well worth it for the payoff.
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