Robert Reed (1) (1956–)

Una sorta di religione oltranzista, aggressiva, maschilista e ormonale occupa mondi alternativi, utilizzando il rapimento per fornire le donne necessarie a mettere al mondo nuovi figli, che a loro volta continueranno in questa pratica.
Ma la mentalità maschile è una mentalità di stupro, delle donne così come della natura, e i mondi conquistati inesorabilmente sono condannati a morte.
E' necessario che sorga una nuova Eva, per rifondare l'umanità su principi più rispettosi della natura e show more dei rapporti tra gli individui. show less

I enjoyed the prequel to this book, 'Marrow', but found it lacking in some respects. This is a different experience altogether, but it does help to have read the first book just to start getting your head around the setting.

The Great Ship is the size of a Jovian planet. Humans were the first to discover it, empty and drifting, and they took it over. Centuries later, the Ship has become the ultimate cruise liner, voyaging the galaxy to allow different races to come together, explore and show more journey or just plain hang out together. As there is no faster-than-light travel in Reed's universe, the biological forms overcome this by having greatly extended lifespans as well as advanced medical techniques to overcome many of the more inconvenient kinds of death.

The first novel, 'Marrow', had a lot of scene-setting and a plot about the very centre of the Great Ship, an ordinary planet-sized core called Marrow. The trouble was that, having given his characters extended lifespans, Reed had to do something with them, and it made for quite a static story. Civilizations rose and fell in the course of a few pages. Not so in this book; suddenly the plot is far more mobile, there are new characters and many more of them; and there is wide-screen action on a scale that I found staggering.

This is certainly a book of contrasting scales; one minute you are contemplating parts of the Ship and boggling at its size; the next, the focus has pulled out and you are watching a major space battle as the movements of pinpricks of light. There are more incidental characters, and they are actually interesting people, if still a little fleeting in their passage through the pages; and the level of invention is up there with the rest and the best of Reed's earlier work.

This isn't the end of the story; another book is signposted at the close of this one. But with this size of canvas, there's enough scope for as many books as Reed can produce. And if they're all like this, then I'll have no problem with that. show less

WARNING! Some familiarity with advanced particle physics required (well, at least a passing knowledge of the difference between baryonic matter and dark matter). Not for anyone who thinks that science fiction is all 'Star Wars' stuff.

Brian Aldiss' description of a certain kind of science fiction as 'wide-screen baroque' could have been invented for this book. Godlike, near-immortal super-potent humans rule the galaxy and play mud pies with universes. Inevitably, things go wrong when even show more gods overstep their powers and trigger the explosion of the galactic core. The person responsible - the Alice of the title - flees to her family home to await judgement but also to plot with her baby brother how to evade the consequences of her actions. (By 'baby brother' we mean someone probably only 500 years old or so.)

Add to this intrigues between the thousand Families who make up the ruling caste of super-humans, and we have another large-scale novel from Robert Reed.

Although I sometimes have problems with novels where the protagonists start engaging in metaphysical finger-painting and intellectually grappling with the space-time continuum (when some novelists start doing this sort of thing, they tend to overlook minor issues like 'plot' and 'characterization'), in this case I was pleased that Reed kept us quite well-focussed. Characterization in particular was quite well-done and certainly better than some of his earlier novels; and although some of the plot became quite abstract, by concentrating on individual protagonists, the novel didn't lose its way. show less

Beyond the Veil of Stars reads like an autobiography of a boy who spends his childhood with his father chasing evidence of aliens and then grows up to be one. The tone is matter-of-fact, which helped me buy into the premise of a universe in which "people" can walk through "intrusions" on their own planet and come out the other side on another planet in the form of a native of that planet.
The characters and the relationships between them are what takes Robert Reed's book more than a cut show more above the average science fiction. The evolution of the relationship between the protagonist, Cornell, and his spaceship-chasing father over the years is the human thread that carries the story. Along the journey, other relationships, both short- and long-lived, are realistically developed, as are the characters. For instance, Cornell's missing mother haunts the book through photographs and memories, then comes on scene during what is for Cornell a life-changing cameo.
Other wonderfully drawn characters, who age or mature along with Cornell and his perception of them, are his neighbors, the "Petes", who act as surrogate uncle and aunt, Porsche Neal, Cornell's basketball-playing, space-travelling girlfriend, who is full of alien surprises, Logan, a military-type/hero-gone-mad supervisor of alien missions, and the hapless Jordick, who in the words of the immortal Leonard H. McCoy, "should have stood in bed" rather than enrolled for duty on the alien world of High Desert.
The story unfolds with Cornell traveling with his father and Pete, who for the simple reason of being a kind, caring person, chauffeurs them from one alien-spotting to another. The trio seek manifestations of alien landings, which are large glass circles in the ground. Toward the end of the book these circles again play an important role in Cornell's and his father's lives. One day the earth suddenly "everts" so that instead of the usuall starry sky, the people of earth find themselves looking up at a reflection of the earth. This event is referred to as the "Change" for the rest of the book and as with the Kennedy assasination or the bombing of the Twin Towers, everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing the day the "Change" took place. Scientists begin to take a serious look at the possibility of aliens at that point, although only a specially chosen elite have access to that knowledge.
This is a book worth reading twice for the elegance and complexity of its characters and their relationships, with the science fiction aspect mainly serving as the setting, as it should be. show less