I kind of liked Necropath, so thought I'd give this a try. Sad to say, it was every bit as good as Cosmopath. ( )

While the plot was a bit contrived the story was good. Interesting world. I am not sure about the ending. ( )

I enjoyed Brown's epic perspective, but the book felt a little lacking in the 3rd dimension. The sheer size of the Helix (which is itself a marvellous concept) is conveyed well, or at least as well as such size can be conveyed, both by prose, and by the reaction of the characters. But somehow I never really felt drawn down to ground level. Perhaps the continued emphasis on the astronomical scale of the helix served in part to highlight that the characters might just as well be there to show off the creation. I loved the twists in the characters' development, although Friday's continued - relentless, even - assertion that the 'rats' would just assault them started to irritate me, although I was amused when it eventually happened. Some of the writing was awkward, which was disappointing: one example being something like "Kaluchek looked up at Hendry, smiling", which appears twice, close together, with little variation.

I've been feeling the need for grit and dirt and blood in my fiction recently, and some of that does indeed show up, but I don't feel that the depth of characters is portrayed quite as well as by David Gemmell, for example. Overall, where reading Cecilia Dart-Thornton is like wading through gloriously treacly wodges of the English language, reading Brown is like taking a stroll in the open air, suggesting almost a sliding through the book rather than reading. I'm rather proud of that simile, also of the word 'wodge'. ( )

Helix is a decent sci-fi story, kind of a post-apocalyptic, hail mary chance for the human race. I picked this book off the shelf at Powell's and bought it after reading the back cover, but the back cover had facts wrong about the story. There were some things just plain wrong with the story, but if you don't mind looking past them it's not a bad book.

The story is about a colonization ship launched by a dying Earth to start over out amongst the stars. Humanity has already mostly died off, and the Mars and Lunar colonies have all returned to a polluted and resource-shy Earth. The ship is launched and a small team of technicians are awoken when the engines explode at just under light speed (this is the most glaringly obvious hole in the book: how did they slow down to crash-land from that speed??) and they are forced to crash-land on an upcoming planet.

The planet turns out to be one of thousands, strung along in a spiraling helix shape around a star. The technicians leave on a journey to find a habitable part of the helix to start their new colony, enounter several strange alien species, and eventually locate and communicate with the original builders of the helix itself.

So it wasn't bad, just don't expect it to be on par with great science fiction like Alastair Reynolds. ( )

Helix, by Eric Brown, is an exciting space romp.

Earth sends a colony ship to the stars as a last-ditch effort to give humanity a future. But when something happens to the ship along the way, the crew must crash-land on the closest planet. Though it's not exactly a normal planet. It's a part of a created helix of connected worlds revolving around its sun. The surviving crew decides to go in search of a hospitable world to begin their settlement. But along the way, they encounter hostile aliens, harsh environments, and a group of religious fanatical aliens bent on killing all who oppose them.

The story bounces back and forth mainly between the characters Joe Hendry, a human on board the colony ship, and Ehrin Telsa, a native of one of the planets in the helix. As the story progresses, their stories intertwine. And we are able to follow their growth as characters along their path of discovery of what the helix is and who the builders were.

The story keeps an exciting, fast pace throughout most of the novel, as mortal danger constantly looms. Reminiscent of the Catholic church in the times of the Inquisition, the religious fanatical aliens are the main threat. Though the description of the interplanetary ziggurat structures was a bit confusing, I found it was a minor detail in an otherwise unique idea. Far from being hard science fiction, Helix is an ideal space opera, complete with larger than life characters and a bit of romance. ( )