Alastair Reynolds — On the Steel Breeze

I finished Alastair Reynolds’ “On the Steel Breeze” yesterday and I really enjoyed it (but then I also liked “Pushing Ice”…). It’s set after the events of “Blue Remembered Earth” but is supposedly readable stand-alone, but to be honest I wish it hadn’t been so long since I’d read that because there were a ton of cross-references.

This book seems to have more a Culture vibe to it (and it seems oddly optimistic), and starts to move events from Solar-scale in the last book to something slightly larger. It starts off a bit slow, but then turned into a real page-turner for me (and only rarely employed the usual “cliffhanger at end of chapter followed by perspective switch / narrative break” strategy).

There’s quite a few coincidences and odd choices about resource allocation (elephants…), but none of these dragged the story down in my opinion. An improvement on “Blue Remembered Earth” in every regard (and that wasn’t bad at all to start with).

Recommended.

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