Book review: Blue Remembered Earth

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/29577.html]

Not that anyone cares, but I though it might be interesting for me to write up the books I read. I'll try to do them all, good or bad. Its a sort of a diary.

Quick summary: fun enough, but ultimately disappointing.

Why I read it: I've read others by him. With similar results.

Where: Waterstones, over the course of quite a few Saturdays.

Blue Remembered Earth is a "we've got out into the solar system but travel is still slow" kind of novel. There's a nod towards climate change (its 2160, and the world is being repaired) but this has no plot effect; there's a nod towards geopolitical change (Africa is on top, and the Earth bits of the story are set there) but this has no real effect either. And so on. In the usual way of books like this there's a big corporation run by a few people, which helps move things along, and individuals can do far more than is plausible. After a bit a character is sent off on a chase across the solar system following some clues. This helps fill in quite a few pages, and helps show us the universe of the book, but it all becomes a bit obvious too quickly.

Then at the end we get introduced to the new Tech that has been discovered / found, and which will revolutionise this world. Apparently this is a trilogy, so presumably something interesting will happen in the next books, but in this one its all a bit "meh". In order to make the story hang together you have to believe that the woman who found all this, notoriously gung-ho and exploratory and bold, all of a sudden became cautious and decided to leave it for our book's characters to find. The tech itself is "new physics" apparently found scrawled on the side (and then fallen off of) of a natural monolith / tourist attraction on Phobos, which no-one else happened to have noticed. And was then reconstructed by a Brilliant Lone Physicist, who then decided to retire and become a housekeeper. And was then converted from physics to spaceship engine, without anyone ever leaking the secret. Speaking of which, clear signs of intelligent life have been discovered around a distant star, and that news hasn't leaked either, except to Our Hero. It feels like the ending hadn't been planned before the story started, and then when the ending became necessary, he couldn't be bothered to go back and re-write the beginning to make it all plausible.

But that's me being picky, which is fun in itself. Along the way there is enough amusing colour to make it worth getting to the end.