Customer Reviews

Blueheart

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not for those in search of pure adventure or thinly-drawn characters. This is David Brin with more emotion and more science. It's filled with politics, families coping, concensus building and finely revealed plot turns. Ms. Sinclair has created the planet Blueheart as a perfect setting for illustrating the intricate human issues related to gene manipulation, human-engineered adaptation, star-travel and terraforming. I was entertained from start to finish and am rathering hoping the author returns to Blueheart - I want to know what happens to these people!

This is a novel of colonisation and the changes it brings to the place and the colonists. Where many books in this genre develop either the setting at the expense of the characters or the characters at the expense of the setting, Alison Sinclair manages both, and throws in all sorts of current political concerns (environmental destruction, genetic engineering etc.). The way these elements (the water-covered planet with its complex ecosystem and characters you can believe) are moulded together with slow-burning but intriguing plot development is so masterly that it makes it hard to believe that the author is so young... AND her first book, Legacies, was so good too! Alison Sinclair deserves a much wider readership.

Alison Sinclair is one of the best new writers in hard SF today. Her future worlds are based on a strong background in real science, combined with complex and interesting characters and spellbinding plots. Blueheart starts with the question of whether to terraform a colonized world or genetically adapt to it, and tells the story of the people whose lives will be changed forever by the outcome of that political decision.

This book had a fantastic premise, and an intriguing storyline filled with betrayal, murder, shady government plots, and revolutionaries. The biggest problem with this book however is that it is marred by poor editing.

I found an unusually large number of typographical errors (and I don't mean British v. American spelling), as well as some passages that were either poorly worded, or had TOO MANY words.

I may enjoy this book when I read it again. I know that I didn't get all of it, and it is so complex in the plot that it deserves another reading.

I bought this book in an airport and tore through the first 150-odd pages on a flight from Dallas to Boston.I enjoyed and admired the imagination required to create a true-to-itself world completely covered in water (sort of the "ante-Dune), but, after being freed from the forced concentration of the airplane, I was completely uninterested in returning to the book.

NOTHING WAS HAPPENING.

I'm sure I'll get back to it at some point, but it isn't calling to me.

The characters were obscure, hard to get close to and, in some cases, downright annoying (when one of them died - has he committed suicide? - I have to admit I was a little relieved; one less whiner to keep up with!).

This book is certainly not bad and not without merit. But, judging by the way most of the sci-fi fans I know devour books, this one seems to be a tough hunk to chew.

I'd love to hear a contrasting opinion; I need a reason to finish the book.

Blueheart is a very solid job of 'world-building'; the work of presenting a whole planet is done as well as any Poul Anderson or the first Dune book. And it's nice to read a modern office-politics story in science fiction; Galactic Feudalism gets old. However, I'm a guy. This book is the story of a guy who gets nagged 24/7. It's like a 'Sweet Savage Love' story where the alpha male rapes the heroine in the first chapter and catches hell for it for the rest of the book, except Rache,in 'Blueheart', isn't the kind of cartoon-macho rapist who deserves 200 pages of nagging. He's just an ordinary man, trying to get by in the universe. And it's 500 pages. 5 stars for being the kind of book Miss Alison wanted to write, as well as a good tripwire.

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