Customer Reviews

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

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I've read all the Reynolds novels and love them. I got this as a Christmas present and I was curious to see if someone who is very gifted at writing 700 page novels (which are really sub-parts of a 2000+ page saga) could pull off a 130 page short story. He can't. These stories read like the cliff notes version of the first 500 pages of a 700 page story...with a quick ending that doesn't resolve anything.

They are entertaining to read and you won't have to waste much time, so I can't completely pan the book. But it doesn't really add any depth to the Revelation Space universe.

The short story "Diamond Dogs" was very captivating. I would have bought the book just for that.

While reading Diamond I couldn't help but wonder if Reynolds is a Stephen King fan since his tale had the essense of King's Tower Series. Which consequently is based on the poem "the childe Roland..." and is about Roland's quest to get to the tower and reach the top.

With regards to Diamond Dogs only: Reynolds here seems to be revisiting territory that was more memorably depicted by A.J. Budrys in Rogue Moon. In a sense, Diamond Dogs represents everything wrong with science fiction, to the degree it trivializes serious and potentially very gripping issues, such as cloning, cybernetic modification of life and how it affects people (what it ultimately means to be human), for the sole convenience and purpose of serving a tiresome, shopworn alien puzzle plot. Reynolds could have gotten a longer and more gripping book just out of the dramatic issue of cybernetics: the slow 'robotification' of humans.

(I can't help feeling this is why science fiction remains a genre that is dismissed as ultimately trivial.)