Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

£5.495
FREE Shipping

Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.495
£5.495 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

Originally settled by self-replicating robots carrying the genetic material to construct humans on site ahead of a more conventional colonisation. We see this latter phenomenon in people who suffer from diseases like Alzheimer’s—but what if we willingly added or subtracted memories rather than lost them indiscriminately and uncontrollably?

As the buildings, implants, and technology that ran Chasm City were disrupted and ran amok, the city as it then existed was effectively destroyed along with its golden age. The other main character, Tanner Mirabel, is a former soldier who lives in Sky's Edge hundreds of years after Haussmann was executed. It’s much more contained, and concerns itself with a mystery on a much more intimate scale than the vast sprawling space epics that make up the rest of the original “trilogy”. A city where citizens could transform their bodies within days into human/animal blends or even upload their memories and lives into machines for safekeeping.The main character, Tanner, is an assassin who is on the trail of a man that he intends to kill for revenge. Of course, by that point the true nature of Tanner’s complicated identity issues has been revealed, changing everything.

I would say, in fact, that Chasm City is tighter and more compelling than the Inhibitor Trilogy that spawned it. Chasm City has many of the same issues as Revelation Space – paper-thin characters and overly expository dialogue chief among them – but it’s still a pretty enjoyable dark sci-fi adventure, and I’m looking forward to getting back into the story of the main trilogy with Redemption Ark.

The chase requires quite a bit of interstellar travel, part of which is even on a space elevator which brings to mind Arthur C. Cool ideas here include an in-depth consideration of a generation ship-type mission, a different take on cybernetic implants, musings on the psychological impact of virtual immortality and a richly imagined post-plague dystopia. Perhaps one of the reasons I enjoyed Sky’s narrative so much was the relative straightforwardness of the plot compared to the digressions that dominate Tanner’s. Like the first Revelation Space book, the first half of the book was build up with the second half ramping up the pace with twists and counter twists that will have your mouth hanging open - well mine was anyway.

In Chasm City Reynolds seems to be paying homage to cheesy who-dun-its, plot-twisty detective novels and overwrought crime thrillers. The use of low-tech also resembles the post-fossil fuel future society of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.I remember the gargantuan, Gormenghast-esque spaceship with a miniscule crew spending decades to travel between stars; I remember the archaeological dig of an extinct alien species whose myths hinted at some terrible and vengeful god; I remember the impression that humanity’s scattered, isolated colonies were all authoritarian dictatorships, their little remaining statecraft consisting mostly of threats and coercion. As a result, the quasi-utopian civilization of the Glitter Band has been reduced to a Rust Belt of decimated orbitals taken over by ruined buildings, machinery, and habitats that have taken on strange and gothic shapes that continually change on their own volition, a seething organic-mechanical landscape that has reduced the high-tech world of Yellowstone and its capital city of Chasm City to a post-cyberpunk melange of low-tech, twisted and crumbling buildings, feral tribes of bottom-dwelling humans that occupy the Mulch, and more powerful elites that live in the Canopy above and occasionally hunt the unfortunates of the Mulch for entertainment. Orașul abisului este un roman ce conține suficiente elemente din recuzita genului - știință, lumi exotice, conflicte intergalactice și violența aferentă. the prose is unimaginative, the plot is drab and slow, and the dialogue feels like it was written by someone with only a vague concept of how people communicate.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop