This book is Reynolds take on The Lion King. Or so was my initial impression after listening to the Audible sample where the narration is accompanied by sweet African background music that had me humming some rendition of “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight...”No no no no noooo! What is happening! This is not gothic space opera. This doesn't even have John Lee as narrator. What is the universe coming to!? Suffice to say, I did not spend a credit on the audio version. It st...

Imaginative at times, but mostly plays out like a game of cat and mouse that eventually has no bearing whatsoever on the overarching plot of the story.There are many cool ideas buried in here (A planet found bearing signs of artificial life, for example!), but 98% of the story revolves around the politics of a few family members. I didn't exactly find this riveting, or even particularly entertaining.I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that Alastair Reynolds has managed to produce

5 starsI have been a huge fan of Alastair Reynolds for a long time thanks to his incredible Revelation Space series. Blue Remembered Earth is a very different type of novel from the series mentioned. This is a science fiction light novel told only the way that Alastair Reynolds can do it. This is an accessible starting point to those new to the masterful author. Blue Remembered Earth is tailored for a much larger audience as the science fiction is merely another character in the story, and not t...

as I plan to have the full FBC rv in a day, just a few comments so farI liked it quite a lot though I liked In the Mouth of Whale more as i thought the Reynolds novel a bit too long for its content, while the characters do not come as distinguished as they could, especially Geoffrey and Sunday.There is a lot of great stuff though - the world building top notch, Africa as a major power comes off naturally and pitch perfect, the Aquatics, the Moon, the Martians, the Mech, the AI phobia of the soci...

DNF at ~45 %I honestly do not understand what I had read and why did I bother up until 45 percent. This book, well, it might be well-written, at least from a technical viewpoint, but fails miserably in all the other viewpoints. First and foremost – I did not believe a single word about this brave new world and the worldbuilding in general. A world, fast-forwarded a mere hundred and a couple of decades forward, and suddenly we have a nexus of civilization right next to Mount Kilimanjaro in the mi...

Excellent novel that left me tearful, but perhaps not for the traditional reasons. There are certain sci-fi ideas that always kick my ass, and one of them are stories about how the stars open up. I certainly got very emotional by the end of this novel, and that might have been a little more surprising, had someone asked me how the novel was shaping up by the half-way mark. It had become a scavenger hunt with interesting elements, and that's fine and fun, but I hadn't expected the huge consequenc...

Actual rating: 2.5 stars.A potboiler with a humanity-spreads-its-wings theme, filled with hard sic-fi babble about nanotech and human/machine interfacing. The future societies and governments Reynolds describes are quite creepy, built around pervasive electronic surveillance of the population backed up by psycho-mechanical limits on individual human behavior: solar system-wide communitarianism gone mad. There is one small surveillance-free zone on the dark side of the Moon, and, frankly, I found...

There are better five-star books, but that didn't stop me. It's large, jammed with ideas, and tells an engaging story. Most of all, I enjoyed reading it. It would be unfortunate to expect this to be like other Reynolds works. It's more like a book from one of the established stars of 30 years ago. I've read a lot of those, and maybe that's why I liked this. What Reynolds adds is a wonderful casualness about all the whizbang technology, and an offsetting realism in areas where there has NOT bee...

Grand scale, many different SF topics and settings. Artificial intelligence, the Moon, Mars, elephants, robots, human modification, take your pick.My main gripes—quite a door stopper and the plot idea of a scavenger hunt across space felt a bit gimmicky and forced. What was the point of that? I know where it led, but it felt a bit too contrived for my taste.The hard sci fi info dumps went over my head once or twice as well. Maybe reading them instead of listening to them might have made it easie...

Fantastically fun space opera with aliens and a mystery to solve.

A solid 3.5 Stars for this book. It doesn't deserve a 3 star rating, but I can't bring myself to go with the 4 stars due to the slow build up of the story that at times had me contemplating not finishing it.Imagine a time in the future where we have removed our aggression, where the 'system' enforces its no aggression to others. So if you went to hit someone, then the system will quickly shut you down. Well that actually leads to very little conflict, mainly verbal, which makes for a story that

Much fuss in the SF publishing world has been made about the fact that in 2009 Alastair was given a large sum of money, allegedly £1 million, with his British publishers for ten books to be published over the next ten years. Though the steam-punky Terminal World was published in 2010, it seems that much of this advance was connected to this series, a hard SF tale of the emergence of Africa in the 22nd century as a superpower group of nations and Earth’s transcendence to the stars.My initial thou...

I have mixed feelings about this one. Used to the immense depicted universe in Revelation Space series, this one felt too real and airtight. And the focus is changed from technological wonders, enhanced humans and a vastness almost incomprehensible to a mystery story, action driven and family dispute. It has its wonders (it wouldn’t be AR’s work otherwise) but they’re nowhere near the ones from the other novels.The writing is as beautiful as in all the others I have read so far but, given the sm...

"Blue Remembered Earth" is the first of a new series, Poseidon's Children, by Alastair Reynolds. Unlike his previous work in the Revelation Space series, this book is set in the Solar System. The main events of the book happen in the mid 22nd century as imagined by Mr. Reynolds. The book is also a departure in style from his previous work. It is lighter and more optimistic than any of the books in the Revelation Space series. The work is more character driven and has fewer information dense "har...

A quieter novel than Reynolds previous books but a very good read. Every journey that the 2 main characters take has a very real, natural texture and feels perfectly possible.

Un-for-gett-able. A new millennium foundation work of solarpunk and afrofuturism. It’s hard to believe this has not been snapped up and made into a series. Fools! ‘Poseidon’s children,’ he repeated. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ ‘We came through. That’s all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it’s time to start doing something useful with our lives.’ ‘And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, d

Although this took a while to get going for me, Blue Remembered Earth was a very good book with some hard science. I didn't quite get all the physics, but it was still an interesting and enjoyable read.Reviewed for Bitten by Books. http://bittenbybooks.com.

What a thoroughly enjoyable story. From the respect of science, through the centering on Africa and China to the positing of how a world would be shaped by a loss of privacy and the experience of surviving catastrophe, I find very little unpleasant in Blue Remembered Earth. In fact at the moment I can think of nothing. It is. Mystery and adventure story with robots spaceships, intrigue and murder. And while you may guess certain points along the way it will surprise you often. Read it.

RTC. July 2020 Solarpunk group read.