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Capella's Golden Eyes
1st edition Granada 1982 paperback, vg++ In stock shipped from our UK warehouse
- GenresScience Fiction
227 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
39 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Evans
131 books14 followersChristopher D. Evans also writes as Christopher Carpenter, Nathan Elliott, Robert Knight and John Lyon.
See authors with similar names.
Christopher D. Evans was born in 1951 in Tredegar and educated at Cardiff University between 1969–1972, and Swansea University 1973–4. He now lives in South London, where he teaches science full-time at a secondary school. His first novel, Capella’s Golden Eyes, was published in 1980. With Robert Holdstock, he co-edited the Other Edens Series of original science fiction and fantasy anthologies which appeared in the late 1980s. Aztec Century (Gollancz, 1993) won the BSFA Award for Best Novel of 1993 and was runner-up for the Wales Book of the Year Award. Christopher also writes as Christopher Carpenter, Nathan Elliott, Robert Knight and John Lyon.
See authors with similar names.
Christopher D. Evans was born in 1951 in Tredegar and educated at Cardiff University between 1969–1972, and Swansea University 1973–4. He now lives in South London, where he teaches science full-time at a secondary school. His first novel, Capella’s Golden Eyes, was published in 1980. With Robert Holdstock, he co-edited the Other Edens Series of original science fiction and fantasy anthologies which appeared in the late 1980s. Aztec Century (Gollancz, 1993) won the BSFA Award for Best Novel of 1993 and was runner-up for the Wales Book of the Year Award. Christopher also writes as Christopher Carpenter, Nathan Elliott, Robert Knight and John Lyon.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 31, 2015
This is a rereading of a book that has stuck with me since I first read it in the 1980s before lending my copy to a friend and never getting it back. What I remembered correctly from that first reading was that it is a deeply layered story about growing up. The narrator passes through adolescence to early adulthood, but his society, a colony of Earth on a distant start system, also has to grow up as it learns the dark side of its dependence on its apparent benefactors. the M'Threnni, and as it begins to realise the stunting effect of a system where babies are grown from conception in incubators and no one has a family. The society of the colony on Gaia reminds me of settler societies on Earth, such as California, where superficiality is too easy.
What I didn't remember from the first reading was that sometimes the narrator sounds too aware, too informed by knowledge experience that he wouldn't have had, growing up on Gaia rather than Earth. But don't let that put you off.
There is a love story here too. It has bite.
What I didn't remember from the first reading was that sometimes the narrator sounds too aware, too informed by knowledge experience that he wouldn't have had, growing up on Gaia rather than Earth. But don't let that put you off.
There is a love story here too. It has bite.
March 22, 2016
Interesting book. The whole central mystery is never answered and ultimately it's all about humans - it's unsatisfying, but not unpleasantly so.
But yes, 'unsatisfying' is a really good word for this book. It sets up all sorts of things and then tells a story about something else for a while, then resolves the thing it set up in a completely perfunctory way - several times. This is not bad, just weird. It's worth reading if you come across it.
But yes, 'unsatisfying' is a really good word for this book. It sets up all sorts of things and then tells a story about something else for a while, then resolves the thing it set up in a completely perfunctory way - several times. This is not bad, just weird. It's worth reading if you come across it.
August 3, 2008
A short coming of age/revolution/mysterious aliens novel on a colony planet. Superb writing and engrossing action, though the finale is a bit rushed.
November 10, 2022
I first read this when I was about 12 years old and at the time I was very intrigued by it. It was an interesting story and was very different to most of the other science fiction that I had read at the time. On rereading as an adult it doesn't quite feel the same - it still has some interesting concepts but the writing is very terse and stilted.
October 9, 2025
This is another of those SF books that were on my horizon in my youth, talked of favourably in the circles I followed, that I never got around to reading at the time. So I thought I'd try it now.
Yeah, maybe a mistake.
I'd always imagined from the title - the 'eyes' are the twin suns of the Capella system - that this was an artfully, even poetically written book. It even says so on the back cover: "Beautiful from the title onwards" - not an opinion that does Ian Watson any favours, as it turns out. This is one of those first-person SF novels where the author seems to have deliberately chosen to write in a rigidly matter-of-fact, emotionally distant style, the better to impress upon the reader how this far-future existence on an alien world feels absolutely normal to the narrator. What it mostly does is make for flat and wooden prose.
Amusingly, there's also a favourable quote from Christopher Priest on the cover - a writer who's made a career out of this overly precise style of writing. Well of course he's going to like this, you can't help but feel. But I'd argue that with Priest such an approach genuinely is an exercise of style, whereas with Evans it feels more like mannerism.
It doesn't help that another part of Evans' approach is to regularly replace the obvious, everyday word with a more formal one, as if that was also for some reason how we should expect far-future people on alien planets to express themselves. I never really recovered from the narrator's page 1 description of adolescent sexual experimentation with his friends Jax and Annia, who
Liquid.
Fruition.
The story itself emerges slowly out of all this, and never entirely pulls free. Certain plot elements are never developed, others fizzle out, and the final chapter comes absolutely out of nowhere: a complete 90-degree hard turn from everything that has gone before.
I suspect I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I'd managed to read it in my early teens, when I had less to compare it to. My loss.
Yeah, maybe a mistake.
I'd always imagined from the title - the 'eyes' are the twin suns of the Capella system - that this was an artfully, even poetically written book. It even says so on the back cover: "Beautiful from the title onwards" - not an opinion that does Ian Watson any favours, as it turns out. This is one of those first-person SF novels where the author seems to have deliberately chosen to write in a rigidly matter-of-fact, emotionally distant style, the better to impress upon the reader how this far-future existence on an alien world feels absolutely normal to the narrator. What it mostly does is make for flat and wooden prose.
Amusingly, there's also a favourable quote from Christopher Priest on the cover - a writer who's made a career out of this overly precise style of writing. Well of course he's going to like this, you can't help but feel. But I'd argue that with Priest such an approach genuinely is an exercise of style, whereas with Evans it feels more like mannerism.
It doesn't help that another part of Evans' approach is to regularly replace the obvious, everyday word with a more formal one, as if that was also for some reason how we should expect far-future people on alien planets to express themselves. I never really recovered from the narrator's page 1 description of adolescent sexual experimentation with his friends Jax and Annia, who
if we prompted her sufficiently, would manipulate us both, watching with a completely dispassionate fascination as our ardour grew and finally burst into liquid fruition.
Liquid.
Fruition.
The story itself emerges slowly out of all this, and never entirely pulls free. Certain plot elements are never developed, others fizzle out, and the final chapter comes absolutely out of nowhere: a complete 90-degree hard turn from everything that has gone before.
I suspect I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I'd managed to read it in my early teens, when I had less to compare it to. My loss.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews