Tuesday, December 31, 2013

My Review about Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds has excellent ideas and his writing skills have improved over time (Example: characterization), but his plots are somewhat haphazard and the pacing is inconsistent. Chasm City remains his finest book in my opinion. All of the threads work well together, and the gradual revelation of Tanner Mirabel's secrets is brilliantly realized. Revelation Space was a good debut but fatally flawed due to its paper-thin characters and that mind-numbing physics info-dump at the end. Redemption Ark was good up until the overly long ship chase (which took up about half of the book) and the skipped-over relativistic space battle. Absolution Gap took too long to get going and then took the absolute piss by doing a Hamilton at the end. I keep hearing good things about his short stories, and I'm hoping that they are more consistent than his novels. Nightshade Books should be churning out a collection of these stories sometime this year.

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