Customer Reviews

Dreaming in Smoke

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

 

 

So there is a computer-like AI thing with an immersive VR interface. Does that automatically label the story cyberpunk? Most of it takes place outside the interface, while the data collected on the planet by the mediocre scientist Marcsson modify behavior of the AI in control of the colony's base, threatening the colony's existence. No one knows what's going on until the almost very end, and various factions create complications for each other, throwing around sabotage accusations. For the main character, Kalypso, it's all set to music. Or the lack of that. Picked on and abused by almost everyone, she holds the key to everyone's survival without knowing it.

None of the characters are particularly likeable, as they all are viewed from the objective point, emphasizing their human vices and failures. Math is merely called by name, there's none of it there to buffle the reader. Biology is present more strongly, requiring some basic knowlege of what algae are, as they compose all the visible life on the mostly liquid planet.

While some of the flow-of-conscience sequences aren't very interesting, the story in general is filled with overtones of psychedelic poetry. The AI functioning on the basis of Miles Davis's melodies alone is a wonderful idea, but there are also vivid paintings of the grim landscape, surreal encounters in both the reality and virtuality, and an implicit soundtrack detailed on the thank you list. Definitely a fresh non-standard work, and definitely worth reading. It may be called a classic one day. Don't forget to listen to the music!

I love Trish Sullivan's work; I was absolutely enraptured by Lethe. But Dreaming In Smoke had me drowning in math, strange arguements, and a world that would have been better served if the author (luv ya, Trish, really!) would have spent less time on the mechanics of the colonist's existance and more on the mechanics of their emotions. The biggest problem with the book is that I really didn't feel like Azamat Marcsson was much of a threat or why the book spent so much time revolving around his experiments. Not to admit a cheesy past addiction to Nintendo or anything, but dern, I wanted to know more about what life was like for Ganesh during this crisis, it's almost as if the sky was falling, but nobody bothered to spend enough time talking about how and why. And yes, what WERE the fights with the dead? And yes, I would wait and buy it second-hand as well in hindsight.

I never got the hang of disjointed surrealistic novels. This is definately one of those. It seems to meander in various directions, and I never once got the hang of what exactly was going on, or what was supposed to be going on - if anything.

It also suffered from a fault that many futuristic novels have. It seems that references to past events stop about the present time, and go back from there. Few novelist bother to fill in enough backstory for references to the past after the novel was published. It's a minor thing, but it can annoy me at times.

It had the elements of an interesting story, but I couldn't put it together well enough to enjoy the novel. If this is your sort of novel, you'll like this one well enough. It isn't mine, so I didn't.

Sullivan's volume is full of great descriptions of the world inhabited by Kalypso, she makes you feel like you're really there. However, the characters make you really glad you're not there. I personally couldn't have cared less if Kalypso and the rest of the colonists lived or died. I was more concered about the computer, who, combined with the technology which composed it, was a much more compelling element to the story than the selfish whiny characters who wage pointless battles with each other, which are never detailed, you just hear "the dead fought the grunts" but never any mention of HOW the dead fought the grunts, I assume they threw rocks.

The colonization project didn't get off to a great start, and now Kalypso (our heroine) is about to get bitten by the secrets her elders have been keeping.

Dreaming in Smoke served to occupy a few hours, but I have to say, it wasn't good enough to recommend. I never was much of a fan of stream of consciousness, particularly since I never have believed the character's stream. Kalypso is annoying. The whole colony could suffocate, and I really, really wouldn't care. There is a happy ending, yes, and that's nice. I'm not a believer in killing everybody just for effect. But it would have made it more interesting.

I was uncomfortable with some of the science, as I'm almost sure there were some howlers I'd have caught if I paid the slightest attention in highschool biology, or taken chemistry. Ah, well.

So, don't rush out and spend your money on this one. It's okay, you won't be outraged, but look for it, if you decide you want to read it, in your local second hand bookstore.

I enjoyed this book. At times the science behind the story was explained in a very technical way, which made my head spin. And, it left me wishing I had a degree in microbiology so I'd know if the scientific stuff came out of the authors imagination or if the algaes (algi ?) and other parasitic microrganisms described were derived from real life. This made parts of the book difficult to visualize. But the main characters Kalypso, Ganesh and Marcsson were very tangible and hoping they would make it out "alive" kept me reading non-stop. I did feel that the book ended too fast. I believe the author wanted to tell us a bigger story, but may have been advised (ill-advised) to trim it down. Overall, I liked the story alot.

On a hostile planet filled with fast-evolving bacterial life, a group of would-be colonists are endangered when their ship AI goes on the blink.

Though the worldbuilding was full of original detail and the plot featured a lot of action, I found this book nearly impossible to finish. The writing was awkward and full of unnecessary exposition and "telling". The characters' behavior seemed nonsensical, unconnected to what was happening around them--often their reactions seemed weirdly casual, and at other times just inappropriate and lacking perceptible motivation. I couldn't relate to them, and because of that it became hard to focus on the convoluted plot.

I like the author's Someone to Watch Over Me, but I don't recommend this book.

Talk about overblown hype. Passages of this book just drone on and on without going anywhere or contributing to the plot. The writing ain't all that "lyrical" or literary either. I read one other review here who said the reader was "drowning in math" -- what a crock! this is no hard sci-fi, this is no cyberpunk "redefined". I will grant that there are some interesting concepts such as the sociological makeup of the colonists and the biology of the native fauna of T'Nane. It might have been a good short story or maybe a novella, but Tricia Sullivan has stretched her ideas too thinly over a book filled with fluff and lacking much in the way of a compelling plot or characters. Maybe it's the lack of good bagels in her diet (oblique reference to trite "about the author" blurb.

How could I not want to buy a novel that started out like this: The night Kalypso Deed was Dreaming was the same night a four-dimensional snake with a Canadian accent, eleven heads and attitude employed a Diriangen function to rip out all her veins, then swiftly crocheted them into a harp that could only play a medley of Miles Davis tunes transposed (to their detriment) into the key of G.

200+ pages later, my head felt like a candidate for a bottle of Aleve. All this cyberpunk stuff, started by Neuromancer, is just words minced around, with no real content. The prize goes to the best word mincer. It used to be called surrealism, but when that went out of style, add cyberspace and you get cyberpunk. Unngh! The novel Dreamships by Melissa Scott was the last cyberpunk I forced myself to read. It at least has a midsection trying to stretch your imagination; flying ships through hyperspace using VR. This is just minced words. If this is the best new novelist of the year in sci-fi, sci-fi is in trouble.

The structure of this book was really neat: it opens with a minimum of exposition, instead dumping you right into an alien world and people doing procedural things that are unfamiliar. Before you can really get a handle on this, a crisis occurs! The backstory is revealed as the characters deal with the crisis. This is just a really neat way to tell a story. It DID make it hard to get into at first, but once I got going I really appreciated it and found it very compelling.

This book doesn't have as much hard science as something like Cryptonomicon, but I understand why some people were turned off by the chemistry and math. Definitely some of that material went over my head, but I felt like it worked on multiple levels and that a complete understanding of the science wasn't necessary. It added to the richness though.

It's hard to create an alien world, non-typical ways of living and non-typical societies. This book does all of those things and has the audacity to drop you right into them without a ton of prologue. I'm very much looking forward to reading more from this author.