Customer Reviews

Century Rain

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Not revelation space. This starts with a genuine puzzle: humanity on earth has been wiped out hundreds of years ago. But contemporaneously a strange murder case needs solving in Paris, France. It's not time-travel or a parallel universe, so how can this be? Rather deus ex machina is the answer, but this is just background to the plot!

The Paris detective stuff is really not bad: believable characterisation, trademark snappy dialogue and organic plot development. Genuinely page-turning stuff.

At the half-way point it's all change, however. We get into an extended hi-tech chase sequence and the plot development stalls. The editor should have been harsher here. More serious is the collapse of plot credibility. Why would the "extremist slashers" want to unleash their genocidal plan on E2? Both revenge and the quest for real-estate are equally implausible as motivations. And the ending is scrappy.

A shame really - this had potential for audience crossover, but SF folk will like it, even those who hang out at /.

Man, this one just didn't do it for me. Bear in mind, I *like* Reynolds - I devoured "Revelation Space," "Redemption Ark," even the turgid and unsatisfying "Absolution Gap," and was looking forward to seeing what he could do with a slipstream/counterfactual plot.

What have we here? Thin characterization, endless, tension-free chase sequences, and (surprisingly) lotsa pseudoscience. What I liked about Reynold's earlier work was the way he let nanotechnology, exotic-physics propulsion systems, and alien contact produce recognizably human cultural responses - but in "Century Rain" he's given us a mysterious, ancient "hyperweb" of wormholes interconnecting star systems throughout the galaxy, and it's the least interesting thing in the book! It barely figures in the plot except as an excuse to get us to and from the alternate history of "E2."

I dunno, man. Baxter's Manifold books did this better. Hell, even Carl Sagan did it better - and with less mumbo-jumbo around the physics of it.

Worse, Reynolds here commits the fatal error of cuteness. The wildly technophile Slasher culture derives its name and outlook from "a certain Web community of the late twentieth century" (ack), and there are at least three gratuitous in-jokes turning on famous lines from "Casablanca" - "stick my neck out," "beautiful friendship," and "Paris." (Don't get me wrong: I adore "Casablanca," but this ain't the place to celebrate it.)

In summary: this almost feels like a piece of juvenilia acquired and published after the success of the "Revelation Space" books. I'm not ready to write Reynolds off just yet, but I'm afraid "Century Rain" has knocked him off my auto-buy list.

I was happy to see Alastair Reynolds setting a novel in a different universe than his first several books, good those those were. And I was interested to see if his particular talents survived transition to a different setting.

In Century Rain, I can say unreservedly that his spectacular hard-SF imagination is as evident as in his earlier books. That said, some of Reynolds's weaknesses remain: this book is as long as the earlier ones, and I rather think each of his novels would have been better at 3/4 the length or less. His prose is serviceable but not really elegant. His characters (with a couple of exceptions) are fairly stock. But that is -- well, not quibbling, but acknowledging weaknesses that are not fatal weaknesses. So -- acknowledging its weaknesses, I still enjoyed this novel, and I was often fascinated, by the end quite moved, and occasionally awed.

The story begins on two threads. One concerns Wendell Floyd, an American in Paris in 1959. But his Paris is rather altered: its technology lags our own 1959 just a bit, apparently because World War II never happened: the German advance on France stalled in the Ardennes, and Hitler was shortly later deposed. But the evils of fascism were not eliminated, and France in 1959 seems ready to come under the sway of a nasty nativist politician. Floyd is a sometime jazz musician who mainly works as a private detective, and he is drawn into investigating the mysterious death of an American woman, a death the police seem only too quick to write off as an accident or suicide.

Meanwhile, three centuries in the future -- our actual future, it seems -- Verity Auger is an expert on Paris in the "Void Century": the 21st Century. It seems that late in this century something called the Nanocaust wiped out life on Earth. Humans survived in orbit, and have split into two groups: the Threshers (including Verity) oppose almost all nanotech and bodily modification, while the Slashers embrace it. The two are close to fighting a war over possession of Earth. Then Verity is maneuvered into accepting a strange assignment: wormhole travel back to Paris in 1959. It seems another Thresher agent has just been murdered, and Verity must try to recover some valuable information she had gathered.

Obviously, the Earth to which Verity is traveling is Wendell Floyd's Earth, and the murdered Thresher agent is the woman whose death Floyd is investigating. Wendell and Verity cross paths, and sparks fly, as we might (being experienced readers) expect. Their romance is a bit underplayed, and not quite convincing. But they also uncover a series of mysteries, involving the Thresher/Slasher war, factions among the Slashers, and some really bad guys, including some nasty apparent children. And they learn the true nature of Floyd's alternate Earth (which reminded me oddly of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin). The resolution of these SFnal ideas is pretty cool for the most part. The driving motivations of the bad guys, however, are never quite real -- they are just a bit too genocidal for no terribly good reason. But the story does come to a satisfyingly exciting close, and Floyd and Auger's personal story is well resolved as well. It's a good book, not a great one, but certainly it serves notice that Reynolds remains a writer to watch.

All the earmarks of an early novel -- not remotely in the class of Revelation Space series in terms of plot sophistication, crafting of cultures, motivation of characters and such.

In fact "Century Rain", when stood next to Reynolds supposedly earlier books, is so much less an effort, that it smells of a cheap publisher scam -- find some unpublished early work by newly acclaimed writer, spruce it up a bit and publish it as a later work.

Almost half the novel is smothered in a tedious and embarrassingly ill constructed "out of the frying pan" sequence where the two protagonists escape from one increasingly improbable death defying situation only to land in an even worse mess

Scant attention is paid to the pace, detail, nuance and character motivation that made Reynolds wonderous Revelation Space series the gold standard of hard SF.

On the whole, I want my money back!!

What do I like about Alistair Reynolds books? As an intelligent person, but not an intellectual, I marvel at the imagination required to build worlds and factions, future technology and depth of story. I look for detail, a slow build, a gradual unravelling of information throughout the long journey ( not the space chases, but the reading of the book ). I look for believable characters that for a short period become part of your life.

I don't EXPECT an A.R. novel to be a literary masterpiece. I am not sure I would know one even if I read it (unless some high brow told me it was one!).. I am simply looking for a story that makes sense, leads me into situations and worlds that I would not be able to imagine, that creates technologies and cultures that take me away from the "9 to 5", and makes me yearn to know what will happen next.

I am a simple guy, not primarily looking for similarities and comparisons, not looking to make judgements on everything from writing style to plot holes. ... just whether I enjoyed the ride for a few days

Century Rain did it for me in spades. The concept of E2 leads to far more possibilities and questions than one book could hope to cover, and surely that in itself is enough to suggest the basic idea behind the book was brilliant? That is why the ending, with a raft of possible options for Reynolds to pick, was so enjoyable.

Yes, the pacing is patchy, there may be a few too many clichés, and "phew" that was TOO close" moments, but that is what happened in THIS story.

References to "Casablanca"? They are only relevant if you know Casablanca intimately enough to recognise any homage. Sorry I missed them guys, but what the hell, it did not lead to a lessening of the enjoyment of this novel.... Just the reverse, by the sounds of it !

Poor ending ?. Not in the version of the book I read. With all the negative feedback on Reynolds endings, you now tend to reach the last few pages of his books with a sense of "oh, boy, we are getting close to the point where he whole of the rest of the book will be judged". I have to say I thought the ending was superb. No story wraps itself up perfectly and in my mind, if it does, it lessens itself greatly. This story ending was a more than adequate "warm down" .. and left me to ask questions and continue to think about what the characters might have done in the future.

I am not criticising anyone who Is able to pull apart a book like this, spot every failing, cliché, or inanity, but I would suggest that the idea behind this sort of book is to suspend belief and lose yourself for a few days... and that is why I will continue to buy all of A.R. books..... some of which, surprise surprise, are better than others

I've enjoyed this author's work up until I read Diamond Dogs / Turquoise Days. I don't like to read the back of the book cover, as this tends to give too much away... so when I read that book and found it was two novellas... well I was upset. Especially since the first novella is only the first half of a story and abandons itself to nothing.

Anyway, I gave him another chance with Century Rain. $25.00 Canadian for the large format paperback... and honestly, this book is trash.

When a character made the "slash gesture followed by a stab at the heart", I groaned out loud.

With the direct Casablanca references... again, this is just too much. The mysteries in the book are revealed to implausible and problematic truths one by one, with loose ends left unappealingly loose. It's the kind of book that I open and read with enjoyment, then slowly as I feel my intelligence being abused I get more angry. As the story progresses, it is like being a little child running downhill... first it is enjoyable and fun, then it starts to trip, then finally falls flat on its own stupid head.

The ending of this book is probably the worst that I have ever read since I have been reading SF.

By the last few pages which I was just scanning to get the direction of the plot so I could rid myself of this monstrosity, I finally knew why it felt so lame. This book reads like a BAD Star Trek episode.

It's got the fedoras, it has the "what if this important event in history" didn't happen, it has the cheesy lines, it has the romance based on nothing but proximity, it has the technobabble, and it has the "sad" and inevitable parting of the ways.

And how many "last second saves" from disaster are there? OH NO THE BOMB IS TICKING DOWN TO 1 SECOND WHOA CLOSE CALL THE HERO SAVED THE DAY (again). This kind of crap. An entire book stuffed with this kind of thing. Really there is no feeling of pressure or obstacle, you just keep waiting for the next variation of reconfiguring the main deflector dish to emit a tachyon pulse to save the day. You know it is coming, and you are never dissapointed. This is not tension unless you are 10 years old.

So this review is reading pretty disjoint and awful itself, but I can't really be bothered to try to put together a scholarly masterpiece. I just feel ripped off by spending $25.00 on this piece of junk.

I long for the days when I could pick up a Heinlein book at the used bookstore for 50 cents and get a good read, and if not, heck, I was out 25 cents. $25.00 could have bought me a nice bottle of wine and a good buzz, instead of taken a handful of hours out of my life that I can never get back.

I grabbed "Century Rain" with no expectations at all. I got it as a christmas present, and had never read any of the author's work before. I was positively surprised, most of all because the book is such an unusual, creative combination of many familiar things.

There's your regular space opera with a long-gone godlike alien race, alienesque superhumans, Earth devastated due to mankinds' mistakes, spaceships and space battles and all-powerful nanotechnology. Then there's a detective story set in Paris in the 50's, which also picks up a romantic twist as it goes on and gets mixed with the space-opera side, and in between there's a whiff of Stargate - yet it still manages to feel like hard scifi instead of light science-fantasy.

Also, it's one of the shortest 500-page scifi novels I've ever read. Once I got started, I could hardly put it down. What keeps me from calling it a really great book is the fact that I didn't really emotionally connect with any of the characters. The main characters weren't all that deep, and some of the minor ones felt like missed opportunities, interesting persons who should've got more attention. And the end was a bit of an anticlimax after all the amazingly, extremely tough situations before it.

While reading this novel, I felt convinced it had to be a first effort that had been buried in a file cabinet somewhere, brought out to help satisfy fans of the Revelation Space trilogy while Reynolds figures out where he really wants to go next. The "Afterword" suggests instead that it really was written after the trilogy, though I wonder if my supposition isn't at least partly true. Whatever the explanation, this book reads like very weak Reynolds - with a series of familiar devices: out-of-control nanotech, personalities forced to share the same brain, conflict between baseline and self-modified human beings, extended chases maintained over astronomical distances, and so on, all handled much less convincingly, imaginatively, and involvingly. At other key points, it's just weak writing, whether it's on the level of an archaeologist character who, with no apparent military experience or training behind her, rather easily defeats larger numbers of theoretically more capable adversaries, or whether it's on the level of a story that poses huge questions and never comes close to answering them. Robert Charles Wilson recently handled one somewhat similar central concept, for instance - the Earth segregated from the rest of the galaxy by unthinkably superior alien technologies - in SPIN, and in my opinion his greater command of all levels of narrative, character, dialogue, and thematic development put Reynolds to shame. Even Wilson's hard science fiction content - supposedly one of Reynolds' greatest strengths - is more well-developed and more interesting. Here, Reynolds' work reads like naive Sci-Fi of a low order - the kind of thin stuff they might have served out on an old STAR TREK episode when the staff happened to come upon costumes and sets left over from another production. None of this removes the pleasure I took in Reynolds' previous books - among my favorite novels of the last few years, whatever their flaws - but I'll be looking to his next book with as much trepidation as eagerness.

In the 23rd century, Earth is a barren world, rendered uninhabitable nearly two centuries before by the Nanocaust, a global catastrophe of our own making. Now under the surface of the Martian moon Phobos a wormhole is discovered that links us to Earth. Well...not quite. This Earth was never touched by the Nanocaust. In fact, on this doppelganger of humanity's birth it is not even the 23rd century. The year is 1959. And forces are beginning to coalesce against its unwitting inhabitants; a swirling maelstrom whose heart is in Paris, France. These forces may end up leading this Earth down a similar, apocalyptic path to the original.

Add into the mix Verity Auger, an archaeologist and expert on the original Paris, France, and Wendell Floyd, a private detective native to the duplicate Earth who was hired to investigate a murder that is somehow tied to the thickening plot against this world, and what you have is another well-written tale about the distant future of humanity by Alistair Reynolds.

Century Rain's plot flows really well and moves along quickly, never feeling stilted or choppy. The duplicate, 1959 Earth is described in great detail. And, while some of the minor characters could have been fleshed out a bit more, the over all tale does not lack for personae that seem truly human.

The problem I have with this book is that the author does not go into enough detail about certain aspects of the universe he has created. For instance, those who survived the Nanocaust settled in orbiting environs and ultimately split into two primary factions. One faction, the Threshers, live in a near-Earth environment called Tanglewood. The other faction of humanity, the Slashers, settled farther out in the solar system and created the Polity. While there is some cursory detail about Tanglewood at the beginning of the tale, I would like to have been given much more information about what life was like in this place. After all, this place is a sort of banishment...forever living within reach of Earth, but barely able to touch it because of humanity's past crimes.

As for the Slasher's Polity, we get to find out what their position is on the matters at hand, but we never visit any of their outer-system colonies, we are never taken to any of their settlements. What is ordinary life like for this group, who, like the Threshers, are banished from Earth?

If Reynolds had elaborated on these entities more and better delineated the similarities and differences between them, it could have only enhanced the overall plot by showing what humanity has become along with what they have lost. I feel Reynolds missed a chance for vital comparisons between both Thresher and Slasher cultures and what is beyond reach in an Earth that will never be what it once was...humanity's home.

Also, while I don't want to reveal too much, I found it odd that Reynolds created a character in Verity Auger that encounters certain situations and rarely thinks of her two kids when deciding on the course of action for those situations. Would not her motherly instincts at least give her pause about what actions she deems appropriate in certain situations? Early on Auger admits to being a less-than-great mother, but shouldn't there have been some internal struggle, no matter how fleeting? Again, while I feel that Reynolds missed a chance for further depth in his story, this was the only blemish in a character, that at times, lit up the page.

While I believe these flaws detracted from the sheer depth of the over all story, I must give credit where credit is due. Reynolds has written another fine story that is extremely easy to read, and leaves you turning page after page until there are...alas...no more pages to turn.

I was reading through a list of "who's reading what", and I saw that the head of Amazon was reading Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds. It sounded like a decent sci-fi title, so I gave it a try. After taking a couple weeks to finish it, my general impression is "eh"...

Set in the future, earth is now uninhabitable because of some nanotech infestation that killed everyone off except for some people who had already started to develop settlements in space. Verity Auger is an archeologist who specializes in bringing back remains from the planet, and now the authorities need her help in figuring out a mystery... as in what happened to one of their agents who traveled back in time via a wormhole in space, and ended up murdered. The problem is that her few belongings seem to point to some catastrophe in the making, and no one knows what she was on to before she got killed. Auger reluctantly goes on the mission, and meets up with a person from the past who is also trying to solve the mystery. He doesn't know he's living in a "backup" of earth, and she doesn't want to tell him. That all comes to an end when the Slashers infiltrate the past in order to get the murdered agents clues, and Auger and her friend need to escape via a collapsing wormhole in time to prevent *his* world from meeting the same fate as the present-day earth.

The premise held some promise, and I started into the book expecting to get absorbed rather quickly. But way too much time was spent in the past world, bringing the detective up to the point where Auger gets injected into the story. Getting Auger's story up to the intersection point was better, but both sides tended to drag a bit. It wasn't until the last 200 or so pages (out of 500+) that I really wanted to keep reading to find out how it all ended. And even after it was all done, I was sort of left wondering if the time I spent had been worth it.

Perhaps others will like it, as it's not a *bad* novel. It just didn't grab hold and captivate me like I was hoping for...