Customer Reviews

Summertide

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

 

 

This story explores a detailed universe that you only get a taste of in this first of four books. Each chapter makes you yearn for the discoveries to come in the next, and the book as a whole makes you eager to learn about the rest of the 'mysterious artifacts'. The characters are fairly well developed with a hint of romantic interest here and there. The story centers on the action and a relentless countdown to the event the book is named after; "Summertide". I haven't had a book stay on my mind between readings like this in a while. I'm ordering the next three books so I can continue with the characters and artifacts introduced in this book as soon as possible. It was a fun escape into a well developed future universe.

This far-future sci-fi novel is almost twenty years old but it was new to me.

Good stuff, about multiple human colonies, and friendly and enemy aliens in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, all trying to make sense of gigantic Builder artifacts that seem to electromagnetically converge on the planet Quake at Summertide.

The only odd part, especially for the late author Sheffield who usually wrote hard sci-fi, was the superluminal travel via Bose Nodes, apparently some sort of piggyback off the Bose-Einstein quantum phenomenon.

But it isn't explained and so it's wave-of-the-hand technology more commonly found in space opera. Nevertheless, it was a thrilling read and I commend the tale to you and have already bought the sequels for myself.

I just finished reading all four books in this series. I read them mostly because of the ideas that were presented, knowing pretty clearly after the first book that character depth and presentation isn't the author's strong point.

Good: The artifacts are interesting and unique, and present a great backdrop of the story that Sheffield is telling. He also has a great description of the aliens and presents them interestingly enough.

Bad: It was quite hard to care about these characters. They seemed like caricatures more than people, and they didnt seem real to me...they were mostly stereotypical, especially the characters presnted in the last two books. These people are in the middle of events of epic proportions on a galactic scale, but they repeatedly acted with only their own interests in mind. Which brings me to my main gripe...The plot focused only on the charactures, and you never got a sense that the rest of the galactic arm cared about what was going on. I cant help but compare books like this to Hyperion and its sequels, and these books pale in comparison. I felt like I was reading a Piers Anthony space epic. Decent fun, not a bad read, but could have been so much better. And the secret to the Builders was cool, I must admit.

SUMMERTIDE is the first novel of Sheffield's Heritage Universe series. Though a complete story in itself, it is a teaser for the later and better books. Sheffield peppers his universe with a series of Builder artifacts, remanents of a long vanished alien race. The surviving sentient races, particularly humans and the insectoid Cecropians, seek to discover the secrets of the Builders.

An interesting collection of characters independently come to the conclusion that some of those secrets may be unlocked during Summertide, a time of violent seismic disturbances on the planet Quake caused by a rare alignment of planets. There's Darya Lang, the leading, but naive, human authority on Builder artifacts. Julian/Steven Graves, elite Alliance counciler and possessor of two personalities and two brains. He's in pursuit of two teenage girls charged with genocide. There's the ruthless Cecropian, Atvar H'sial, sometime ally of Louis Nenda, a shady, equally ruthless human, and Kallik, Nenda's smart but cong

The synopsis: Evil space squid threatens sexy, two-dimensional human female. Male hero saves her and they hook up. I'm not kidding.