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A review by synoptic_view
Edges by Linda Nagata
Spoilers throughout.
A mixed bag. I was really into the initial premise--last bastion of humanity holding out against a galactic machine intelligence by hiding in a bubble of space that re-aligns any machine spaceships that enter. But that gets dropped within the first couple chapters and is followed by a long (like 1/3 of the book long) and extremely boring section. Too many people have decided to go on a space journey, so the captain of the ship is forced to keep them in cold sleep. He ends up having a bunch of debates with the other two people who are onboard, then having more debates with the crew when they wake up. It all amounts to nothing in the end, and only rarely does anyone point out the obvious thing: that the ship couldn't support everyone if they were awake. This is especially frustrating because the characters are all supposed to be these hyper-rational transhumans. In the end, I started skipping each chapter that started with this plot point. After skipping my way through about 35% of the book, these debates mercifully ended.
The majority of the rest of the book is taken up by the people in the spaceship finding then doing battle with a potentially malevolent, human-derived computer virus/former god. This had some cool parts, but again I was struck by the fact that these supposedly smart people couldn't think to (literally) save their own lives.
Oh, and the audio-book narration was flat and contained multiple mispronunciations.
Everything I have said so far is pretty negative, but the book did have some cool bits. And I love the idea of living spaceships (really wish the spaceships had been more fleshed out as characters).
A mixed bag. I was really into the initial premise--last bastion of humanity holding out against a galactic machine intelligence by hiding in a bubble of space that re-aligns any machine spaceships that enter. But that gets dropped within the first couple chapters and is followed by a long (like 1/3 of the book long) and extremely boring section. Too many people have decided to go on a space journey, so the captain of the ship is forced to keep them in cold sleep. He ends up having a bunch of debates with the other two people who are onboard, then having more debates with the crew when they wake up. It all amounts to nothing in the end, and only rarely does anyone point out the obvious thing: that the ship couldn't support everyone if they were awake. This is especially frustrating because the characters are all supposed to be these hyper-rational transhumans. In the end, I started skipping each chapter that started with this plot point. After skipping my way through about 35% of the book, these debates mercifully ended.
The majority of the rest of the book is taken up by the people in the spaceship finding then doing battle with a potentially malevolent, human-derived computer virus/former god. This had some cool parts, but again I was struck by the fact that these supposedly smart people couldn't think to (literally) save their own lives.
Oh, and the audio-book narration was flat and contained multiple mispronunciations.
Everything I have said so far is pretty negative, but the book did have some cool bits. And I love the idea of living spaceships (really wish the spaceships had been more fleshed out as characters).