Poseidon's Wake

One of my pet peeves with a lot of speculative/science fiction is that they tend to focus on one particular technology (e.g. genetic engineering, AI, nanotech, FTL, etc.), and ignore the implications/interactions with others. In this book, Reynolds goes the opposite route, tackling the full range of post-singularity possibilities. The lines between man/machine and man/animal are blurred repeatedly, in various combinations and scenarios. This at times makes for an awkward novel, because it's difficult to discuss the worldview of philosophical zombies (a la David Chalmers, not the brain eating kind) while keeping a story going.

As a result, people looking for an exciting fast-paced action-filled adventure with endearing characters and a show more creative plot are going to be woefully disappointed. The endless pages of dry dialogue between uninteresting characters interspersed with even drier exposition make for a laborious read. However, the reward for sticking with it is worth the slog. Set against the backdrop of inscrutable ancient alien artifacts, petty disputes, inter-species competition, and a kitchen sink's worth of advanced technologies, the ideas slowly spool out over the course of the book, as they are gently but painstakingly poked and prodded from a number of different directions.

At the heart of the book are the battling notions that "all you need is love" vs "nothing matters". Trite phrases and the sorts of things that college freshman ponder in their dorms with a few tokes after reading Kant and Nietzsche for the first time. While I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, Reynolds does a truly magnificent job of providing a much broader context for finding meaning in an uncaring world, skirting the line between optimism and despair, and ultimately providing the setting to let the reader decide for themselves. show less

Reynolds continues to amaze. I remembered [b:Blue Remembered Earth|9424053|Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children, #1)|Alastair Reynolds|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1318599915s/9424053.jpg|14308470] very fondly and this third book, taking place several hundred years after the events taking place there, captures more than just the spirit, but gives us one hell of an adventure among the stars.

Best points?

The Watchmakers, a race of sublime intelligences that went too far and are no longer fully conscious. :)
The uplifted elephants. :)

The sheer scope of the adventure, discovery, horror, and amazing courage. :)

This is Reynolds. Never doubt it. His world building and tech are some of the very, very best in Hard-SF. These show more characters, in particular, are also some of his most interesting and well developed. From the Savanna to the oceanic human-mods to the Mars takeover of machine intelligences to deep space exploration, the settings prove to be more than good spice for the treat that is his characters.

ELEPHANTS IN SPACE!!!

And let me make one caveat, here. This is not Barsk. Barsk came out 4 years after Blue Remembered Earth and one year after this third book. :) And I Reynolds's tales better. :) show less

After decades of reading science fiction, I discovered Alastair Reynolds about three years ago and, given the scope of his work, am astonished that I had not previously encountered him. Poseidon’s Wake is the final book of a trilogy set in the not distant future.

The action in this installment takes place a generation after the second book. In previous installments, an alien artifact was discovered many light years away, and a human “starship” was launched to colonize the planet of Crucible. Conflicts with artificial intelligence develops on both Crucible and Mars. In Poseidon’s Wake, humans advance even further into space to investigate a signal from a previously launched mission.

This is excellent science fiction, as you can show more always expect from Reynolds, however, at 1,800 pages, it is at least 300 pages too long. The amount of “bloat” and padding is what I would expect of someone trying to extend a 250 page novel to 300 pages. In one sequence, a primary character spends roughly 5 pages apologizing to another. What could have been accomplished in half a page runs interminably for five pages. Later, a similar situation develops with identical results; page after page of apology. It’s almost as if Reynolds has a fetish for apologia.

Alastair Reynolds is amazingly prolific, and his grasp of “hard” science fiction is as good as it gets. His imagination for advances in physics and cultural changes are amazing. However, I have come to the conclusion that his huge body of work is accomplished at the expense of polish. Reynolds’s activity consists of, write, write, write, PUBLISH. Write, write, write, PUBLISH. What is missing is polish and editing. This, along with many other of his works would be far better were it 100 pages shorter. It is simply bloated, turning a 4½ star effort into 3 stars.

Oh, and elephants in space is just stupid. show less

Poseidon's Wake follows two distantly related members of the Akinya family, Goma and Kanu, as their paths cross in a distant star system and concludes Reynolds' Poseidon's Children trilogy.

Goma and her wife Ru have dedicated themselves to the study of Crucible's elephants, search for the remains of the enhanced intelligence introduced by the genetically enhanced Tantors. When a message arrives from Gliese 163 asking for Ndege, Goma's mother, Goma insists on being sent in her place and Ru, realising that the mission might offer a chance to meet a few of the remaining Tantors, tags along. After an eventful journey, during which Goma's uncle Mposi comes to suspect that someone might want to sabotage the mission, the starship Travertine show more arrives at its destination where it finds a version of Eunice Akinya, the clan's founder, holed up on airless world for daring to oppose the goals of the Tantors, a group of elephants uplifted to intelligence, and their scheming matriarch Dakota.

The initial sections on Crucible serve both a recap to the events of On the Steel Breeze and to provide an indication of the passage of time: the world, the focus of the centuries long destination of the moon-sized holoships, is now fully colonised, with Mposi and Ndege Akinya, young in the previous book, now well seriously elderly themselves. It is also clear that something has gone terribly wrong in the interval between the two books: Ndege is a pariah held under permanent house arrest for causing the deaths of large numbers of people while working on an experiment with the planet's mountain-sized Mandala structure.

Kanu, meanwhile, begins his journey as ambassador to the Evolvarium, a group of machine intelligences who have taken over Mars. Killed in a terrorist attack and reassembled by an AI called Swift, Kanu returns to Earth in disgrace where bumps into his ex-wife. Picking up where they left off, the pair head to Europa where Kanu is manipulated into travelling to Gliese 163 aboard a starship called Icebreaker. Upon arrival Kanu and Nissa fly past a super-earth water-world dubbed Poseidon, where vast arches loop out of the water and strange moons circulate in precise orbits and where the Watchkeeprs - alien machines the size of worlds who have been hanging like a Sword of Damocles over humanity's heads since their arrival at Crucible - have settled in to observe events from a safe distance.

After suffering damage to their ship shortly after their arrival, Nissa and Kanu are forced to see the help of a community of Tantors that have somehow come to dominate a small moon in orbit around one of the system's rockier planets. Her they fall under the power of Dakota who, clearly nursing an obsessive desire - given to her by the Watchkeeprs - to explore the planet of Poseidon, promptly blackmails them into modifying Icebreaker for a mission to the planet. Convinced by Eunice's argument that any investigation of the planet is likely to prove catastrophic for all of humanity - the planet's caretakers have threatened to exterminate any group of explorers they judge to be unworthy - the crew of the Travertine engage in a game of brinkmanship with the Icebreaker trying to persuade Dakota to abandon her mission. Kanu, trapped by Dakota's threats on one hand and by the M-builders' threats to his species on the other, tries to find a middle path that will satisfy both parties and which will also allow him to keep his own humanity.

As befits the last book in the trilogy, Reynolds gives us some answers to some of the questions raised by the two groups of aliens encountered in the second book - both the still-present Watchkeepers and the long-vanished M-builders - in a way that raises interesting secondary questions about what it means to be conscious and how to create meaning in an absurd universe.

Some of this information comes through revelation from authority - Eunice, having passed through the barrier surrounding Poseidon, has experienced the Terror, an acute existential angst imparted by the M-builders' knowledge that the universe is utterly meaningless - but many of the answers, most of which are incomplete, come from the speculative application of conscious intelligence to the problem. Thus many of the answers to the mysteries of the Mandala come from Ndege's investigations on Crucible and her attempts to relate them to Memphis Chibesa's early work on the alien equations first found on Phobos in Blue Remembered Earth, with the engraved symbols on Poseidon's great arches only serving to provide pointers to show just how far humanity still has to go. In some ways, the final section of the book reminds me of nothing quite so much as Rendezvous with Rama, with a group of poorly equipped but clever humans - aided in this case by enhanced elephants - explore a semi-hostile and completely indifferent world with indeterminate results.

Reynolds, unlike Clarke, populates his trilogy with a strong cast of characters, with Eunice Akinya the sustaining note that runs through entire series. Of the ultimate Akinya offspring, Kanu and Goma start at opposite ends of the spectrum - Goma's initial intolerance of the Second Chancers versus Kanu's willingness to accept the Evolvarium as friends - only for their positions to gradually come together as Goma becomes increasingly tolerant and Kanu realises that there are limits to the power of diplomacy when dealing with a zealous obsessive.

But my favourite relationship in the book is that between Ru and Eunice. The pair get off to a very bad start and, while Ru eventually comes to tolerate Goma's friendship with Eunice, she never quite forgets her initial encounter and is only member of the Travertine mission who seems to realise that Eunice is just as obsessive and difficult and potentially dangerous as Dakota. The final resolution, when it comes, feels earned: rather than some saccarine reconciliation, Eunice simply acknowledge the debt that she owes to Ru and takes the most pragmatic course of action, even though it comes at great cost to herself.

While I still think On the Steel Breeze might be my favourite book in the series, I really enjoyed Poseidon's Wake and I was impressed that Reynolds managed to stick the dismount, leaving us with a ending the rounds off the current threat and leaves us with a final image of hope: Memphis the Tantor heading off to confront a brave new future, unshackled, finally, from the chains of humanity. show less

I consider myself a sturdy Reynolds fan, so I stumbled, dragged, trudged through this final volume. The problems encountered in Books 1&2 did not go away. That is, I was so bored with the interactions, attitudes, dialogue between all the characters with the EXCEPTION of Swift/Kanu in this one that it was unbearable. Why didn't anyone at Orion tell him? I'm sorry but it is not enough to have 'cool' sf ideas and such clunkiness and over-complexity. Not one moment of humor, either. The elephants are as dreary as the people. Something missing here. Sorry to be so critical. The cool sf idea IS pretty cool, but so convoluted! As I say if you don't care about anything but the how-to and the ideas then you might love it. Three stars out of show more respect for A.R.*** show less

I didn't realize when I picked this up that it was the third of a trilogy. As it turns out, I read the second book a couple years ago not realizing it was part of a trilogy either. This turned out not to matter, as Reynolds does a fantastic job of providing the context you need. Especially since, as here, there's been a lot of stuff happening between the end of the previous book and the events that start this one out. Eventually, flashbacks and reminiscences fill in the details, and we are left with a hard-SF big picture story that I found very satisfying. A number of characters (but by no means all of them) are annoying and unsympathetic at the beginning, but most of them change over the course of the book, either in themselves or in show more our perception of them, via the eyes of other characters. show less

Started out well, but became a bit disjointed towards the end as Reynolds obviously realised it was already too long, but hadn't yet tied all the threads up. Personally I'd have created a fourth book rather than rushing everything into the end of this one. Really would have benefited from a recent re-read of the preceding two novels as the complexities of the Aikima family history are not re-explained, or easily recalled.

We are now a few generations down the tree from the original exploits of Eunice and her grandchildren. Their great-grandchildren ( I think) are livign with the intelligent elephants on the world of Crucible, still marked by the alien Mandela. A clear text, light constant message arrives ' bring Negele' - who is their show more elderly mother, in no fit state for the rigours of spacetravel and sleepover. The message has come from an otherwise insignificant star some 70 light-years away. That it's in Swahili, suggests a human aware sender, but littel otehr details can be gathered. Surprisingly few political machinations take place and an an expedition is launched, no generational ship, merely 50 odd crew in sleep caskets.

Meanwhile one of the older relatives in another branch is Kanu, currently ambassador for the Evolvarium machine intelligences on Mars. However there remain groups of humans who object to the current treaty and wish to free/conquer their former colony. Kanu gets caught up in such an incident, which ultimately leads him to becoming aware of the message to Crucible, and another actor in the drama that unfolds at the destination.

While the science remains at Reynolds' ever impeccable levels, sadly the story telling falls slightly sub-par on this one. The strands don't weave effortlessly together, but are pulled vigorously into a specific shape, and the reader feels it. Choppy sequence changes from Goma to kanu and back, contrived circumstances, ridiculously complicit timing events, and then characters and themes abandoned once they'd served a minor point. A fairly prolonged philosophical info-dump formed the 'conclusion', of the plot events. I'm really not sure that an SF novel was the place for this, whilst to a degree commentary on social themes should be present, this was hardly subtle. Alien maths proves there is no god, but you don't have to suffer the nihilism of despair, for a single act of human kindness refutes this. And having all of characters then completely change their personalities wasn't very convincing. An extended epilogue didn't really help, even if it did rush together the remaining strands.

The trilogy is nominally closed at this point, but the future of the Risen leaves space for more novels in the universe, and I suspect there is a lot more ground to be covered. show less