Book review: Eversion

By Alistair Reynolds. See Goodreads. TL;DR: it's OK but, as with so many books, better if you stop before the end. He does better than many others because you should stop 3/4 or perhaps even 4/5 of the way through.

As always, spoilers follow.

The idea of the lead voice continually running through the same events but with successively later technology is quite cute and handled quite well (in particular, although it is to some extent the same story multiple times, this works: because it isn't the same, it evolves). The characters, and the reader, slowly realise that he is approaching, and shying away from, something. I think in the end though there's a confusion: the shying-away-from relies on human reactions to being near death, which isn't true for an AI (much is made of the horror of the skull-in-the-spacesuit. For a human, being that would be horrifying. For an AI, it is rather less clear). The existence of (only one) sub-AI isn't really clear either.

So I wanted another plot twist near the end, something that would be horrifying: that our doctor has been lied to; he really is a human, trapped in there, somehow.

The nature of the (extra-solar-system) entity, The Edifice or whatever, is never clear, and that's alright: it is come to do some intelligence gathering, that makes some sense; what doesn't really make sense is how the crews of two ships, one of which is forewarned, would have been dumb enough to fall into its grasp. Nor is it clear how it was going to report its intelligence back to base; although - and here we come to the eversion of the title - perhaps it is broken.

The eversion concept comes from the Morin surface and Sphere eversion. They aren't strongly connected to the rest of the book; the entire thing could have been written without them, really; and this is dissatisfying; it becomes just plot candy.

My picture is of the college associated with Lady Margaret boat club.