Terminal World

There's a scene towards the end of Terminal World that perfectly encapsulates the book: Our heroes on a desperate rescue mission back to the city that betrayed them, in a Zeppelin losing its high tech defenses bit by bit, being strafed and boarded by suicidal pirates in wingsuits. It's steampunk, pretty cool, and makes no damn sense. Reynolds does his best with Big Ideas, and in this case the Big Idea (some sort of disaster that creates Zones that limit technology, the survivors clustered around some a mysterious mega-structure), just isn't big enough to hold together the rather flat and amoral characters.

Reynolds develops the idea of a dying world in the far future where the laws of physics vary from place to place, based on the changing resolution of the underlying “grid” on which matter is laid out. In the high-resolution areas, extremely precise things like nanotechnology work; in others, cybernetics are fine but nanotech is out; in some, electronics works but microchips don’t (I did a double take early on in the book when someone has a rotary dial cellphone); in some, only steam technology works (and there is a highly amusing encounter with a cyborg warrior who has been retrofitted to survive in a steam-only zone); in the lowest habitable regions, it’s just living beings made of flexible proteins. (Some areas don’t support show more life at all.) Changing zones, however, plays hell with the nervous systems of humans, leading to a need for medicines to help them adapt when they travel.

The center of the action is a Big Dumb Object named Spearpoint: an artificial mountain spiraling up into the stratosphere, on which the zones of varying technology vary quite quickly, with nanotech-enabled “angels” in the Celestial Levels soaring over places with names like Circuit City, Neon Heights, Steamville, and Horsetown. Our hero, Quillon, is a fallen “angel”, using his expertise in medicine to hide out in Neon Heights working as a coroner... until he discovers that his former colleagues from the Celestial Levels intend to hunt him down.

This leads to an odyssey into the outside world, complete with some never-well-explained antagonists, the Skullboys, who provide a Mad Max-ish postapocalyptic vibe to the tale, discoveries about the forgotten history of the world, and an eventual return to Spearpoint. The main threads of the story get wrapped up at the end, but Reynolds doesn’t give a lot of insight into the motivations of the antagonists, and while he hints of conspiracies going on, he never sheds much light on them. (It’s realistic that the protagonists never get a chance to find out, but dissatisfying for the reader.) A fun read, but not up to the quality of his other work. show less

It's really quite amazing how much imagination can be crammed into these books.

It begins like a heist novel exploring a tower-of-babel-like city full of the fascinating inventions and unexplained forced-technological restrictions. The topmost layers allow for the most impressive levels of high-tech used by "angels" that can be real bastards all the way down to the lowest levels that only allow for horse-drawn simple tech. Passing through these zones can be very painful and usually life-threatening. Special drugs to help you acclimatize are in high demand. The heist portion begins with a doctor who used to be a full angel but is now on the run from the rest of his kind, but instead of leaving us here in this city, the novel becomes a show more full-blown steampunk novel with aerial battles, biological/machine constructs, and a full-out terraforming attempt gone very wrong.

This is Reynolds, of course, so expect fully-thought-out worldbuilding, awesome technologies and reasons for these technologies, a bit of tongue-in-cheek, and a lot of great action when it suits the tale. My only complaint is in a few slow bits in the center, but that was very nicely mitigated by a courtroom battle sandwiched between mutiny, murder, and a thousand-year strife in the skies. The later surprises are rather awesome and better still... CONSISTENT. All those reasons for the technological strata come clear. :)

As a regular SF, it still stands out a full head above most, especially when it comes to ... you get it ... IMAGINATION. ;) show less

Zeppelins. A steam-powered cyborg. Mad Max-style savages. Angels! And a city on a spire of--something--rising into the sky, on a cooling Earth.

Overlaying everything are the zones, little understood but very carefully mapped, because what technology works depends on what zone you are in. Highest up on the spire of Spearpoint are the Celestial Levels, where the angels dwell, modified humans who can fly and who are heavily loaded with nanotech inside them. Because the nanotech won't work at any lower level, angels can't leave the Celestial Levels. At the bottom is Horse Town, where the tech is about the level of the American Wild West.

Quillon lives in Neon Heights, just below Circuit City and just above Steamville. He's the last survivor show more of an infiltration mission from Celestial Heights, his wings and nanotech removed, under a false identity, working as a pathologist.

Until a barely-alive angel fallen from the Heights is brought to him, with the message that the faction that sent Quillon to Neon Heights now wants him and the knowledge hidden in his head back--and they don't need him to be alive to get what they need. Quillon has to run, out of Spearpoint altogether, and right now. He turns to Fray, who might be considered a local fixer, and one of the few friends Quillon has made. Fray quickly plans his escape, with a guide, Meroka, foul-mouthed, impatient, but very, very capable. Oh, and she hates angels, for reasons buried in her past, so it's just as well that Fray doesn't tell her Quillon is an angel in disguise.

What could go wrong?

Along the way to getting shanghaied into the dirigible fleet called Swarm, they meet the steam-powered cyborg, ruthless, drug-addicted savages, a woman who might be a techtomancer and her five-year-old daughter, and the "vorgs," really nasty cyborgs who survive in part by harvesting human organs. Especially brains.

And in the midst of all this, there's a major zone shift, the result of which is really exciting for everyone who isn't killed by it.

I really enjoyed this one. The characters are multi-leveled and compelling, and everyone you care about has a fundamental decency, albeit sometimes very deeply buried and expressed in quixotic ways. The pacing is great, and the world is a fascinating one.

Reynolds does not believe he needs to give us all the answers. There's plenty of room for a sequel, and I'm a bit surprised that there apparently isn't one. (If I'm wrong, please correct me!)

Recommended.

I bought this book. show less

Fans of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series and his other vastly atmospheric space operas are in for a bit of a surprise in his latest novel, which owes more to China Mieville's Bas-Lag books and Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories than to the Clarke/Asimov tradition.

That doesn't mean it's bad, though -- far from it! While the lingering disappointment that there will be no hyperspace chase scenes or stars being sung apart via mind-bogglingly ancient and malign intelligences never wholly leaves the die-hard Reynolds fan reading this book, if that reader is also a fan of steampunk, as I am, there will still be much to enjoy in the story of Quillion, a fallen "angel", and his perilous journey across a barely-recognizable planet Earth in show more the extremely distant future.

Reynolds has long been classed in with China Mieville and others as part of science fiction's "New Weird" movement, largely, I think, due to his taste for the baroque and the grotesque he shares with Mieville (the Melding Plague that forms -- or deforms -- so much of the Revelation Space universe still creeps and grosses me out). With Terminal World he draws much closer to Mieville, especially to the Mieville of The Scar, most of which takes place on a floating city of hundreds of ships and boats lashed together to sail the oceans of Bas-Lag. Reynolds' counterpart is Swarm, the airship-based breakway military arm of "Earth's"* last city, Spearpoint. That's right: a flying city composed of hundreds of airships (not blimps, as we're disdainfully reminded several times by Swarm's residents). I defy any steampunk fan not to swoon at the thought.

Quillion's world has been the victim of a mysterious calamity, to create which Reynolds has taken the notion of a holographic universe and run with it to strange places. The planet is now riddled with zones of differing "resolution," which only allow certain levels of technology to work. Spearpoint is the nexus of this crisis and as travelers descend its downward spiral they proceed from "Circuit City" (which seems to enjoy our own present level of development at least) to "Neon Heights" (which seems to be in the 1940s or 1950s) down to "Steamtown" (!) and even to the point of "Horsetown" where nothing more complex and sophisticated than animal muscle seems to work. How this state of affairs has come to be is never fully explained but it has something to do with Spearpoint's original function as something radically different from just a corkscrewing platform on which to build a city. We learn only a little of this original function as it is lost, all but ancient history, close to completely forgotten.

If I give the impression that the world steals the thunder of the story and characters, that's largely the case, but that's not to say that there are not some compelling individuals populating the story. Curtana, female airship captain, can swash the buckler with any maritime hero of yore; Meroka, Quillion's guide out of Spearpoint, is tough and complex, as is Quillion himself in a different way. While he is out of his depth for most of the story, and often kind of helpless, he is sympathetic rather than annoying, and more than earns his keep before the tale is told.

I like to see Reynolds stretching beyond the space opera-or sci-fi/noir genres he's been comfortably writing in so far, and really wondering if there's anything he can't do. Do recommend.

*People refer to this planet as "Earth" but there are tons of hints within the novel that indicate this is actually a terraformed Mars slowly reverting to its original state, which I find utterly fascinating. show less

I have to say, I was profoundly disappointed in Terminal World. I've read everything else of Reynolds', as far as I know, and have always enjoyed them, if not uniformly. He writes very tightly, and even the novels I haven't enjoyed as much, I've come away respecting for the clear planning and care that went into crafting them. I also have really enjoyed Reynolds' rather harsh, dark universes and view of behavior. His characters are often cruel, or simply unknowable, and there is often loss and terror, which make the books quite gripping.

Terminal World is quite a different animal. The book quickly leaves the story in which it begins - a mystery about the protagonist's past- quite early on, our main character is looking to escape his show more circumstances. At this point, the story seems as though it will be about something else, and the escape is a temporary detour, or a plot device to locate us somewhere else or introduce new characters. However, the rest of the story lags along for pages and becomes entirely about the escape, and how it goes and where it ends up. The characters are sappy, which is surprising for Reynolds - with many opportunities for darkness and mystery, we get a lot of fluff and sunshine and Pollyannaism. I really felt like someone else wrote this one.

I wouldn't read this if you're a real fan of Reynolds. And I don't agree with taggage like "hard sf" - which is accurate of all his other work. This is a loose, Pollyanna-ish faux-dystopian fantasy novel, and was hard work for me to read. show less

This book is based on very complex ideas, and packed with action. Not everything resolved by the end, usually a peeve for me, but it had enough answers to be a complete novel. I want to find the sequel (I'm sure there must be one) and start reading it right away.

ETA: no, there apparently is no sequel as of 2017.