Blue Remembered Earth Paperback – Big Book, 25 September 2014

I'm completing this in English because the book is in English.This lived up to Reynold's normal quality of writing and genuinely did evoke something of the classic SF. It's the first in a trology (which can be a little frustrating) and I found the characters well-formed and interesting. The story was well-structured. Sometimes I feel that Reynold's can be a little over-inventive but I didn't feel that at all with this book. If you enjoy hard SF, then I think you are likely to enjoy this.

This is how space opera should be: Following mover/shaker families through the years and millennia, world-shattering being belittled as 'local'...I actually read the second book (On the Steel Breeze) first, which is absolutely no problem story-wise - this one still had me firmly in it's grasp. Perfect.The plot revolves around the Akinya family and what gave rise to the pilgrimage of book 2 - reviewing the insights and revelations, i begin to wonder whether it might not even have been beneficial to have read the books in this order, as a lot of exposition felt quite good and might have spoiled the experience in the second book.

Alastair Reynolds has quickly become a big name in sci-fi, and I have no doubt that fans of his works is love this book. It's set in the not-so-distant future where humanity is still confined to the claustrophobic bubble of our own solar system. I enjoyed this book, and will certainly buy the rest of the series when they are published - but it's not my favourite book by this author.One of the staple of Alastair Reynolds is slower-than-light travel. In previous books this has dramatically changed the style of his books, and had a great impact on the story itself (see, for example, Chasm City (GollanczF.)). Given the relatively small distances traveled in this book it doesn't have as huge an impact on the story as it might otherwise have had.The two things that the author excels at, in my opinion, are deep characters that change in believable ways, and mind blowing plots. This book is no different. The characters are all interesting, believable and respond to events. On the other hand it is perhaps the first book by this author where there wasn't really any one character that I especially liked. I was interested in the characters and what happened to them, but I wasn't particularly attached to them.There is no way for me to explain whether or not the plot of this book was mind blowing in any particular way without potentially giving away the plot. The best I can do is to say that it is written in the author's well-known style and leave it at that. The conclusion of the book was satisfying and ended at just the right time.Why only 4 stars? I felt that the structure of this book became a little to cliche - it's difficult to explain without giving away the story but there was a lot of traveling around collecting clues when the clues themselves were of virtually no consequence in the end. The fact that the characters never sat down and thought about whether they actually had to collect all the clues to reach the goal stabbed at me halfway through the book. At that point I have to admit I wasn't entirely entertained and I thought the book had become painfully predictable. The latter part of the book managed to make up for it though, and I would advise any fan of sci-fi to read it through to the end.

Manche Bücher des Autors haben ihre Längen und Schwächen. Auch in diesem Buch wird es ab und an ein bisschen langatmig bzw langsam und ist nicht ganz so spannend, wie man es von Reynolds auch gewohnt ist. Die Reihe wird jedoch später besser und wer Space Opern mag, sollte sich das mal anschauen.

After the slight disappointment that was Terminal World, Reynolds proves that he still knows how to deliver top-quality science fiction.While writing Blue Remembered Earth, Reynolds mentioned that he wanted to aim for a more optimistic future than anything he'd written to date. BRE certainly fits that description, although aspects of the dark and twisted settings of his previous works can still be found here and there, in fact one of the major themes of this novel is the contrast between the semi-Utopian Earth and the less restrained but more dangerous colonies. It's also generally a lot "harder" SF than anything he's done so far, with much more rigorous scientific constraints than before- although again, this doesn't stop Reynolds from coming up with unique and interesting speculation about the future, something few authors do as well as he does.The plot for this novel is something of a "treasure hunt", kicked off by the death of Eunice Akinya, matriach of the Akinya household. Various factions within the Akinya house, and others, want to get at various secret Eunice has left behind. Geoffry, the protagonist, wants nothing to do with the family squabbles, but finds himself drawn into it early on, as does his sister Sunday, again an ostracised Akinya caught up in family politics. Once the plot starts going, it keeps the reader engaged the whole way through, and unlike some of Reynolds' previous work it doesn't drag in the middle. It then builds up to a satisfying conclusion that leaves plenty of scope open for future work. The characterisation is also improved and most of the characters are quite believable, with the exception of the two antagonists.If I had to identify anything wrong with this novel, I'd say that some aspects feel a little, well, forced. For instance, a recurring element of the novel is "the Mechanism", a vaguely-described surveillance system which seems to cover the entire developed world and supposedly makes any sort of crime impossible. As well as feeling slightly implausible, it obviously serves to hinder the plot, which often chafes at the restrictions the mechanism puts in place (the mechanism itself also appears to vary in effectiveness as the plot demands, and how it works is never really explained). Reynolds did mention in an interview that he was deliberately trying to eschew any dependence on crime or war to the plot, which does unfortunately constrain his options somewhat.That said, a very good novel, and back to the hard-sf speculative fiction that Reynolds still leads the field in.