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.

Gravitational Lensing

It is from Einstein's equivalence relation (General theory of relativity)

According to it, Space time is curved around an object having mass The greater the mass, greater the curvature. If you see through such a curved space-time, image seems Stretched to you around the corners of the object this is gravitational lensing(also known as optical effect of gravitation)

Smoking

Smoking ban kicks in! Hard winter comes and encourages illness through colds and other illnesses alike. The NHS is over worked with a huge extra amount of patients admitted with "not smoking in pubs" related man flu. Gordon Brown puts yet more tax on smokers while still not allowing them the freedom to smoke. Lets hope the Tory's mention they might remove the smoking ban if elected. Pub takings are down 10% as smokers stay in and drink too much vodka. Economy of local publicans taking a turn for the worse!