Good science fiction is more about the characters than the science. And this is good science fiction. Unfortunately, Kress goes a little overboard in weighting the book toward the characters (sometimes less human drama is more), but this is still a very interesting story. Kress presents a familiar question (what comes after death) and answers it in a unique way, without taking any of the various moralistic routes a less skilled author might have. ( )

Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress is a science fiction novel that starts as one of the best books I had read lately and then looses its steam and never picks it up again. Ten thousands years before the start of the book (which is in 2020), a race that calls themselves the Atoners had wronged the humanity in a way they do not want to explain. What becomes clear very soon is that they had taken some people from Earth and put them on other planets - 7 pairs of planets. Pairs... so that a blind experiment can be performed - and now they want witnesses to go to these planets and witness something. And this stealing turns out not to be the big thing that they had done.

The part of the book that was following one of these witnesses' teams was the most interesting part - Kress manages to build two very different human societies and to show how our own society deals with change. Then the witnesses come back on Earth and the book goes downhill. It keeps it up for a while but it just drags and drags. It leads to how the Atoners atone for what they had done... except that in the aftermath of what happens, most of the book becomes irrelevant... and some parts remain unexplained. Or maybe the first parts put the bar way too high - if it was put just in a few pages, I might have liked the rest a lot more. But I somehow wish the book had kept strong to the end.... ( )

Nancy Kress is great at setting up "what if?" plots and this is another one. Plus it moves along and has some good surprises. A fun read. If only she could write better. ( )

Aliens who call themselves Atoners come to Earth to confess that they did humanity a great wrong some 10,000 years ago. They ask for volunteers to travel to other planets and Witness the harm that was done. This first half of the book follows Witnesses Lucca and Cam as they experience life on twin planets. The second half picks up after the Witnesses' return, after their startling news has exploded on Earth society. The Witnesses--internationally famous and often reviled--have trouble settling back into their lives. And human society has trouble absorbing their revelation, a revelation that Cam embraces and Lucca refuses to believe.

It's not bad, but Kress has done better. ( )

http://michael-hartford.com/blog/?p=5... ( )