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DNF @ 20%Way too little science, far too much YA melodrama. Not my kind of scifi.
This is a mix of space opera and cyberpunk. While published in 1998, it has several quite prophetic notes on today’s world. I read is as a part of monthly reading in January 2020 at SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.It is described by another reviewer as a bastard child of Dune and Neuromancer. I have to add that it also has a great thriller action feel to it as well.It starts on Earth satellite, were a protagonist, Jamie, wakes up one morning to find out that someone is after her and she has to...
Phew, This Alien Shore took me quite a long time to read – I mean listen. In part I found the book dragged a bit, but mostly, this was not the books fault! I had a very busy January so far and had to re-listen to several passages to be very sure, that I understood the story enough. I guess this is another book, that would have been better read – so my audio-experiments are still not fully successful. Despite this, there were some absolute brilliant passages. One of the first was the opening sc...
This Alien Shore delights with a detailed thought-out worldbuilding on a technical as well as a social level. Friedman created an intriguing scenario of the human evolution due to space travel. While humans on Earth try to eradicate all mental imbalances, humans on some of the abandoned colonies revel in different forms of neurodiversity and use face tattoos to give signals for correct interaction. A fascinating concept that convinced me.A large part of the story explores topics of cyberpunk, a
l 75% l starting 2022 off ~great~maybe i should read more sci-fi. maybe i should also make a list.➪ was the plot good? yes. very creative and original. i don’t usually read sci-fi because i’m not a huge fan of tech-y stuff and having to learn a bunch of new science mechanisms and i usually just get bored and confused, but i mostly understood the plot of this book, at least enough that it interested me.➪ did i get confused?absolutely. i don’t know why there are different variants and what’s the
This Alien Shore is a standalone science fiction book. I'd read probably 25% before I suddenly realized I was reading a cyberpunk book and actually enjoying it. It’s obviously cyberpunk from the beginning, really, it’s just that the tone is so different from most I’ve read and I hadn’t paused before then to try to categorize what I was reading. Some of the main characters are different from what I typically expect in cyberpunk, the politics and philosophies are also pretty different, and the wor...
I really, really enjoyed this book! Despite having been written 20+ years ago about digital technologies it did not seem at all dates to me. I’m not inIT, so I wouldn’t know if there was anything ridiculously implausible, so I bought it. Once we settled on a couple of core characters and the plot threads started coming together it started getting really fascinating and quite breathless. I found the ending to be quite satisfying. I liked the basic premise around Neuro diversity too.
This was a very surprising read.I had read a trilogy by C. S. Friedman before and while it was mostly fantasy, it had some really great SF elements. This one was entirely cyberpunk with a very cool, very deep worldbuilding Space-Opera storyline. What did it remind me of? A mix between Cherryh's Downbelow Station and a post-cyberpunk civilization with a rather heavy focus on sophisticated and interesting hacking ethos.For 1998, it has a lot of the Stephenson sensibility while remaining true to th...
I really enjoyed this more than I thought I would! I was really astounded by the thought Friedman put into the social aspects and how she seemed to presage what issues we'd have with the internet and human-machine interactions.CONTENT WARNING: (view spoiler)[ torture, trauma, mental health issues, loss of a loved one, coercion of will, suicide. (hide spoiler)]Things to love:-The opener. The opening sequence was just *chef's kiss.* Emotion, setting, action...it was all so vibrant and taut. Brill...
Fascinating and cerebral scifi! A little too long for my tastes, but it was a well written and engaging read. A complex psychological chase plot that starts better than it ends. Looks like a sequel is coming out in October 2020 called This Virtual Night. Twenty-two years later! Yep, it's on the tbr...Edited to add: Everyone needs a wellseeker. This technology should have been invented years ago. We need it now!! 4 StarsRead on kindle
Rating: 3.5 stars, rounded to 3We wear human bodies, but it takes drugs and software to make us truly human.Finally finished, after a month and a half! This is by no means a bad story -- its world-building and attention to detail is absorbing, and the Gueran culture with its kaja system is intriguing. Those features alone make this space-opera good enough for the rating given. Unfortunately, though I found myself interested whenever I picked up This Alien Shore, I found myself not caring enough
4.5 stars Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.This Alien Shore is another outstanding science fiction novel by an author who I’ve come to respect immensely for her extraordinarily creative worlds, fascinating ideas, complex characters, and elegant prose. If there’s one flaw (from my perspective) with Friedman’s work, it’s a difficulty in actually liking many of her characters, but even if you find that it’s hard to sympathize with them, it’s also hard not to admire them, or at least to see t...
TL;DR version: The bastard love-child of Dune and Neuromancer, but the awesome kind of bastard-child, the one that ends up forging his own destiny and writing his name in the stars.Longer version:I read this book as a teenager, and was deeply affected by it. Later, I read it as an adult, as was not-quite-so impressed anymore, but C.S. Friedman's world had sunk its claws into my mind, deep: the idea of Code as poetry, as art, became a bit of an obsession with me.If this review is vague and lackin...
This was a truly fascinating read, a novel full of compelling ideas about future societies, the vulnerability we might face in a data-driven culture, and the nature of madness. Unlike in some other cyberpunk works I’ve read, the hacking scenes were vividly and lucidly rendered, and the depictions of the brilliant and eccentric hackers rang true. Having said all this, I would have liked a little more emotional depth overall, but there was more humanity than in most tech-centered SF I’ve read, whi...
I need to make a hurried review because I've been slack about all my adult responsibilities surrounding the holiday season, and that big fat roc has come home to roost today.Finished this up on audio. A merging of hard-ish SF and cyberpunk, there were a couple of physics-related plot holes that annoyed me, but otherwise, a pretty good possible future of humankind. Jamisia was a good character, as well as Dr. Kio Masada; I look forward to the other books in the series/trilogy.
Weaving together recognizable elements from such sci-fi classics as Dune and Neuromancer Friedman has created a unique and intriguing far future world. This is a world where Earth, dominated by mega corporations, has become increasingly xenophobic and insular, while the "out" worlds are populated by a diverse set of physically and/or mentally divergent human "variants" who have learned to work together for their shared prosperity.One of these, the Guerans, includes a "guild" of space navigators
5.0 stars (would give it more if i could). This is the sixth book of C. S. Friedman's that I have read and they have all been outstanding and several of them (including this one) are on my list of all-time favorites. This book has a massive scope and is some of the best world-building I have ever seen (especially for a stand alone novel). It also has very well thought out and extremely interesting concepts and aliens. Finally, to complete the trifecta, this book has well drawn, complex character...
4.5 stars rounded up. It wasn't perfect but sure close. I am still not entirely sure how to survive the ainniq but I think that is the way the Guild wants it. So much to enjoy from the cyberpunk aspects to the exploring of other worlds to the reveals of Guild society. Friedman packed so much world building into this and still managed to create a compelling story. I felt for Jamisia as she tried to figure out what exactly she was, I liked the unwritten subtext that maybe we all have parts of thes...
This is maybe a 3.5 rather than a 3-star rating. I enjoyed this, especially the worldbuilding and history Friedman thought up fort, but I never really connected with the characters.
This book was incredible. It reads like a thriller and has some incredible world-building. This is in the far future. Mankind's first experience had tragic effects. It scarred the early pioneers and destroyed spaceflight on the homeworld. In this future, there are many innovations. This is yet another book I've read - along with the Budayeen trilogy by George Alec Effinger and Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds - where man has developed a society and a dependence on technology implants.T...