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Blue Remembered Earth
Feb. 21st, 2020 04:33 pmI discovered Blue Remembered Earth by Alistair Reynolds purely because I was searching for more narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as he's one of my all-time favourite audiobook narrators. Normally, a length of 22 hours would have put me off, but having Kobna's delicious voice in my ears for that long was very much a feature, not a bug.
It's not the sort of book I would normally go for - firmly sci-fi with a lot of wibbly technical stuff and a climax that revolves around a discussion of quark physics that went entirely over my head. However, at its heart is a beautifully portrayed, complex and layered relationship between a brother and sister, who share point of view across the novel.
Geoffrey and Sunday embark on an interplanetary scavenger hunt, prompted by clues left by their grandmother upon her death. This takes them to the moon, Mars, Neptune and back, gradually piecing together the puzzle she has left them to untangle.
It takes a long while to actually get going with the main plot, and it feels like the myriad subplots don't necessarily go anywhere, though they do get at least tangentially linked in by the end. It probably doesn't need to be as long as it is, though, since not that much actually *happens*.
It's interesting to see cast of characters almost wholly populated by people of colour, especially from a white, male author, but it feels sensitively handled and very authentically rooted in its largely African geography. Having Kobna Holdbrook-Smith narrate the audiobook certainly helps in this regard.
So, while it *is* very long, I enjoyed it overall and it didn't feel like it dragged at any point. I was fully invested in the characters, even if I didn't necessarily understand the implications of all the science. There are two more (equally long) books in the series, but they are narrated by someone else, and this one felt like a reasonable standalone, so I'm not going to listen to the others.
It's not the sort of book I would normally go for - firmly sci-fi with a lot of wibbly technical stuff and a climax that revolves around a discussion of quark physics that went entirely over my head. However, at its heart is a beautifully portrayed, complex and layered relationship between a brother and sister, who share point of view across the novel.
Geoffrey and Sunday embark on an interplanetary scavenger hunt, prompted by clues left by their grandmother upon her death. This takes them to the moon, Mars, Neptune and back, gradually piecing together the puzzle she has left them to untangle.
It takes a long while to actually get going with the main plot, and it feels like the myriad subplots don't necessarily go anywhere, though they do get at least tangentially linked in by the end. It probably doesn't need to be as long as it is, though, since not that much actually *happens*.
It's interesting to see cast of characters almost wholly populated by people of colour, especially from a white, male author, but it feels sensitively handled and very authentically rooted in its largely African geography. Having Kobna Holdbrook-Smith narrate the audiobook certainly helps in this regard.
So, while it *is* very long, I enjoyed it overall and it didn't feel like it dragged at any point. I was fully invested in the characters, even if I didn't necessarily understand the implications of all the science. There are two more (equally long) books in the series, but they are narrated by someone else, and this one felt like a reasonable standalone, so I'm not going to listen to the others.
