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Loading... Learning the Worldby Ken MacLeod
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) freixas | Mar 31, 2023 |   ) Enno23 | Aug 15, 2021 | I was given this one after a 5 or so year gap and was a little trepiditious about it. It turns out, however that this book has no such theme. It's a first contact novel, where-in a generation ship arrives in a solar-system that has the first multi-cellular life humans have found outside Earth - but not only that - it has a civilisation just developing radio and powered flight. Cue the usual political contentions between and within both species. We get points of view from both species. I found the aliens more interesting than the humans, despite an intriguing social order prevailing in order to make a generation ship work. This was mainly because the alien characters were much more likeable than the humans. So far, so good. There are enough interesting ideas to make an SF cliche work for the umpteenth time - just like time-travel stories, it's always possible to find something new in first contact if you apply enough imagination - and imagination is something MacLeod has never been short of. So why only two stars? Because lots of the ideas are under-explored. Quite how the human generation ships work, both physically and socially is under explored and the lack of sympathetic characters makes things worse. The story quietly builds to a tense and complex situation only for the denouement to be terribly anti-climactic and the aftermath gets rushed through, with explanations for it that seem either unconvincing or hasty. I've never payed for a MacLeod book and I'm not planning to start, even though this proved a considerable improvement on my previous experiences. (  ) Arbieroo | Jul 17, 2020 |  ) Guide2 | Aug 13, 2019 | no reviews | add a review
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The great sunliner 'But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!' is nearing the end of a four-hundred-year journey. A ship-born generation is tense with expectation for the new system that is to be their home. Expecting to find nothing more complex than bacteria and algae, the detection of electronic signals from one of the planets comes as a shock. In millennia of slow expansion, humanity has never encountered aliens, and yet these new signals cannot be ignored. They suspect a fast robot probe has overtaken them, and send probes of their own to investigate. On a world called Ground, whose inhabitants are struggling into the age of radio, petroleum and powered flight, a young astronomer searching for distant planets detects an anomaly that he presumes must be a comet. His friend, a brilliant foreign physicist, calculates the orbit, only to discover an anomaly of his own. The comet is slowing down ... No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.62)
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