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kittykolb's review
4.0
We've all heard that "there's no I in TEAM" or but what happens when your highly effective group of planet-savers gets separated back into the component "I"s and you don't have your teammates any more to make the dream work? In Reefs of Time, the latest volume of Jeffrey Carver's Chaos Chronicles, the crack team of expert world-savers barely has time to rest from their previous missions before they are divided by communication, political, and physical barriers and sent on separate (and possibly conflicting) missions.
The overarching theme in Reefs is the struggle to do the best one can with imperfect knowledge. The characters, singly or in pairs, work on different aspects of the latest threat to the universe like a family sitting around sections of a jigsaw puzzle. Distance and the fog of war mean that without each other's expertise to rely on, they must draw on their past experiences as well as a host of new beings they meet on Shipworld. (Some are more helpful than others.) My favorite new character is an enigmatic librarian named Amaduse, who tweaks the characters for their reliance on the easy but incomplete information found in the iceline, Shipworld's central computer network. "Not everything is in the iceline," he chides. Carver's characters are pleasantly multi-dimensional. Rather than being one-dimensional baddies, some of the initial antagonists turn out to have quite reasonable explanations for their behavior, and everyone has at least a small amount of character growth over the course of the story.
One of Jeffrey Carver's biggest talents is world-building. His descriptions are "thick;" I could picture all the locations and beings and action sequences very well. I almost felt gleeful as I consumed the descriptions of how Shipworld was put together, since its multiple environments were one of my favorite parts of Strange Attractors. Despite being about a ragtag multi-species crew, or perhaps because of it, the story has universality. The constant struggle to find food "just like home" on Shipworld was something we all can relate to, as well as the desire for "I just deserve a rest before the next life crisis." I also liked how the story kept me guessing along the way. Things that could be explained away as strings of random coincidences to aid the narrative seem suspicious, but is it just the human tendency to make patterns out of things that aren't there?
The only thing that sat uncomfortably with me was the use of the trope where characters "go back in time to prevent something only to cause it to happen in the first place." Even this is not a sure thing, though. The ambiguity and desperate hope that pervade the story apply here, in that maybe things will work out for the best in the next act, Crucible of Time (out in September 2019).
Even though the book is the fifth book in the series, it is not necessary to have read the other books before reading this one. The "catching up" information is spread out in refreshing bursts throughout the first section, rather than the squirmy expository info-dump over tea that one sometimes finds. I recommend this book for anyone who likes imagining the possibilities of infinite combinations of beings and worlds from upright gerbils to spiders and everything else under the galaxy's suns, as well as anyone who likes a good beat-the-clock thriller against a terrifying Big Bad.
This review was based on a free eARC in return for an honest review, but I am definitely going to buy myself a paper copy!
The overarching theme in Reefs is the struggle to do the best one can with imperfect knowledge. The characters, singly or in pairs, work on different aspects of the latest threat to the universe like a family sitting around sections of a jigsaw puzzle. Distance and the fog of war mean that without each other's expertise to rely on, they must draw on their past experiences as well as a host of new beings they meet on Shipworld. (Some are more helpful than others.) My favorite new character is an enigmatic librarian named Amaduse, who tweaks the characters for their reliance on the easy but incomplete information found in the iceline, Shipworld's central computer network. "Not everything is in the iceline," he chides. Carver's characters are pleasantly multi-dimensional. Rather than being one-dimensional baddies, some of the initial antagonists turn out to have quite reasonable explanations for their behavior, and everyone has at least a small amount of character growth over the course of the story.
One of Jeffrey Carver's biggest talents is world-building. His descriptions are "thick;" I could picture all the locations and beings and action sequences very well. I almost felt gleeful as I consumed the descriptions of how Shipworld was put together, since its multiple environments were one of my favorite parts of Strange Attractors. Despite being about a ragtag multi-species crew, or perhaps because of it, the story has universality. The constant struggle to find food "just like home" on Shipworld was something we all can relate to, as well as the desire for "I just deserve a rest before the next life crisis." I also liked how the story kept me guessing along the way. Things that could be explained away as strings of random coincidences to aid the narrative seem suspicious, but is it just the human tendency to make patterns out of things that aren't there?
The only thing that sat uncomfortably with me was the use of the trope where characters "go back in time to prevent something only to cause it to happen in the first place." Even this is not a sure thing, though. The ambiguity and desperate hope that pervade the story apply here, in that maybe things will work out for the best in the next act, Crucible of Time (out in September 2019).
Even though the book is the fifth book in the series, it is not necessary to have read the other books before reading this one. The "catching up" information is spread out in refreshing bursts throughout the first section, rather than the squirmy expository info-dump over tea that one sometimes finds. I recommend this book for anyone who likes imagining the possibilities of infinite combinations of beings and worlds from upright gerbils to spiders and everything else under the galaxy's suns, as well as anyone who likes a good beat-the-clock thriller against a terrifying Big Bad.
This review was based on a free eARC in return for an honest review, but I am definitely going to buy myself a paper copy!
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