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elzabetg's review against another edition
2.0
I just couldn't take the info dumping and the melodrama any longer. The idea was great, the execution not so much. Also for future reference: show don't tell. The info dumps were thick and felt like wading through waist deep mud.
lyleblosser's review against another edition
4.0
The situation developed in the book was a first for me, and I thought it quite well developed. Unique situation, unique alien species and environments, a good attempt to describe higher-dimensional military engagements as well as sub-light ones, interesting near-future cultural insights, and multiple doses of action thrown in for good measure. I liked the science and the sense of wonder the book provided. I am excited to read the sequel!
leebill's review
challenging
informative
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
3.5
Very science oriented. Well written
adunten's review
3.0
Ian Douglas doesn't believe in telling small stories. As time travel stories go, this one's a doozie. Time travel stories generally involve people zipping around by a few centuries or maybe a few thousand years. I recall one with a trip some millions of years into the past to visit Earth's dinosaurs, but even that is dwarfed by the magnitude of what happens to the crew of the Telus Ad Astra when they get zapped 4 billion years into the future, with no way of knowing whether they can ever get back to their own time. It quickly becomes a whopper of a space exploration and survival story as well, filled with amazing alien megastructures, the artifacts of long-dead civs, and super-AIs of godlike intelligence and power. It then goes to some pretty crazy places like the concept of a highly advanced technological civilization ascending not just once, but possibly many times, and galaxy-spanning intelligences. No, Mr. Douglas does not do half-measures.
Douglas throws in a lot of ideas that have external referents in the real world of science fiction and science speculation, like Kardashev civilizations, Alderson disks, Bishop rings, Dyson spheres, Matrioshka brains, the Fermi paradox and Fermi predators, frame dragging, computronium, star lifting. Unlike some authors who dump concepts and leave you to figure them out, he also tends to drop some explanation of these things. There are so many of these it becomes like a form of name-dropping. The idea of Fermi predators is pretty common in sci-fi – I've seen it in [a:James S.A. Corey|4192148|James S.A. Corey|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1573162332p2/4192148.jpg]'s The Expanse series and Alastair Reynolds' [b:Revelation Space|89187|Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)|Alastair Reynolds|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405532042l/89187._SY75_.jpg|219037]. Sometimes Douglas goes a little too elementary in explaining things – I hope no one vreading this book really needs to have the Rosetta Stone explained to them.
This is space opera with a lot of the classic earmarks of space opera – faster-than-light travel, lasers, anti-gravity tech, sexbots, AIs orders of magnitude smarter than humans. But one thing I found fun is how Douglas describes the tactics of space encounters with other ships who can make FTL jumps while the crew is also dealing with the limitations of the electromagnetic energy their sensors rely on. Whether you can “see” your enemy, when you can see them, and sometimes whether you can see two instances of them, all matter very much to staying alive. When your enemy is 5 light-minutes away from you, they can jump to another position, and you won't see them disappear from their last known position for 5 more minutes. But if they jump to a spot closer to you, you'll briefly see them twice. It's a little like fighting a displacer beast which can throw its image several feet away from where it is. I hear Douglas is better known for his pure military sci-fi, and it shows in his descriptions of tactical encounters.
A lot of things about this future have a clean, “Star Trek” feel – even when things get awful, this isn't a gritty dystopia like [b:Altered Carbon|40792913|Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)|Richard K. Morgan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531415180l/40792913._SY75_.jpg|2095852]. It's like someone with a straight-forward, normal mind was challenged to imagine the zaniest things he can think of, and you get this big, ambitious, but basically straight-forward space adventure instead of the twisted, dank shit that comes from the pens of Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, and China Mieville. It pretty obviously draws a lot of inspiration from [b:Ringworld|61179|Ringworld (Ringworld, #1)|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408793358l/61179._SY75_.jpg|924711], which is mentioned in the text, and it reads almost like a survey of every type of space megastructure humans have ever imagined might be feasible in some far-off future of stellar macro-engineering.
It was fun but felt a bit unfinished. There are a lot of very big interesting ideas, but it began to feel like Douglas was running through a checklist of ideas that needed to be dropped in. “Oh wait, we haven't seen a Dyson sphere yet!” And the sub-issue of AI autonomy was handled in a way that seemed a bit fatuous for such a complex issue, which is the subject of many whole novels.
Does it pass the Bechdel test? No. The only female character with any extended time on stage is a female sexbot owned by the captain, who plays the role of a 1950s housewife. There are more than the average number of minor female characters found in a typical SF story, and they're doing a variety of things, from admirals on down. But they're all very minor characters who aren't really players in the story, and there's never more than one per scene. The result is odd. It reads kind of like an Asimov story where everyone important is a man, and there are women here and there bringing coffee and providing sex... but then the editor told Douglas he had to get the story out of the 1950s, so he switched the names of some minor characters and made the housewives sexbots instead of organic women. Commander St. Clare and his sexbot “wife” situation reminds me of George [b:Washington|8255917|Washington A Life|Ron Chernow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348969179l/8255917._SY75_.jpg|13103688] and his slaves – he runs around fretting with guilt about the institution as a whole, and thinks about emancipating his slave, but struggles with actually doing it because it turns out he really likes owning a slave. Which leads to the question of whether slavery is better or worse when the slave is programmed to be perfectly satisfied living in captivity? See also [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SY75_.jpg|3204877].
Douglas throws in a lot of ideas that have external referents in the real world of science fiction and science speculation, like Kardashev civilizations, Alderson disks, Bishop rings, Dyson spheres, Matrioshka brains, the Fermi paradox and Fermi predators, frame dragging, computronium, star lifting. Unlike some authors who dump concepts and leave you to figure them out, he also tends to drop some explanation of these things. There are so many of these it becomes like a form of name-dropping. The idea of Fermi predators is pretty common in sci-fi – I've seen it in [a:James S.A. Corey|4192148|James S.A. Corey|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1573162332p2/4192148.jpg]'s The Expanse series and Alastair Reynolds' [b:Revelation Space|89187|Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)|Alastair Reynolds|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405532042l/89187._SY75_.jpg|219037]. Sometimes Douglas goes a little too elementary in explaining things – I hope no one vreading this book really needs to have the Rosetta Stone explained to them.
This is space opera with a lot of the classic earmarks of space opera – faster-than-light travel, lasers, anti-gravity tech, sexbots, AIs orders of magnitude smarter than humans. But one thing I found fun is how Douglas describes the tactics of space encounters with other ships who can make FTL jumps while the crew is also dealing with the limitations of the electromagnetic energy their sensors rely on. Whether you can “see” your enemy, when you can see them, and sometimes whether you can see two instances of them, all matter very much to staying alive. When your enemy is 5 light-minutes away from you, they can jump to another position, and you won't see them disappear from their last known position for 5 more minutes. But if they jump to a spot closer to you, you'll briefly see them twice. It's a little like fighting a displacer beast which can throw its image several feet away from where it is. I hear Douglas is better known for his pure military sci-fi, and it shows in his descriptions of tactical encounters.
A lot of things about this future have a clean, “Star Trek” feel – even when things get awful, this isn't a gritty dystopia like [b:Altered Carbon|40792913|Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)|Richard K. Morgan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531415180l/40792913._SY75_.jpg|2095852]. It's like someone with a straight-forward, normal mind was challenged to imagine the zaniest things he can think of, and you get this big, ambitious, but basically straight-forward space adventure instead of the twisted, dank shit that comes from the pens of Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, and China Mieville. It pretty obviously draws a lot of inspiration from [b:Ringworld|61179|Ringworld (Ringworld, #1)|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408793358l/61179._SY75_.jpg|924711], which is mentioned in the text, and it reads almost like a survey of every type of space megastructure humans have ever imagined might be feasible in some far-off future of stellar macro-engineering.
It was fun but felt a bit unfinished. There are a lot of very big interesting ideas, but it began to feel like Douglas was running through a checklist of ideas that needed to be dropped in. “Oh wait, we haven't seen a Dyson sphere yet!” And the sub-issue of AI autonomy was handled in a way that seemed a bit fatuous for such a complex issue, which is the subject of many whole novels.
Does it pass the Bechdel test? No. The only female character with any extended time on stage is a female sexbot owned by the captain, who plays the role of a 1950s housewife. There are more than the average number of minor female characters found in a typical SF story, and they're doing a variety of things, from admirals on down. But they're all very minor characters who aren't really players in the story, and there's never more than one per scene. The result is odd. It reads kind of like an Asimov story where everyone important is a man, and there are women here and there bringing coffee and providing sex... but then the editor told Douglas he had to get the story out of the 1950s, so he switched the names of some minor characters and made the housewives sexbots instead of organic women. Commander St. Clare and his sexbot “wife” situation reminds me of George [b:Washington|8255917|Washington A Life|Ron Chernow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348969179l/8255917._SY75_.jpg|13103688] and his slaves – he runs around fretting with guilt about the institution as a whole, and thinks about emancipating his slave, but struggles with actually doing it because it turns out he really likes owning a slave. Which leads to the question of whether slavery is better or worse when the slave is programmed to be perfectly satisfied living in captivity? See also [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SY75_.jpg|3204877].
tome15's review against another edition
4.0
Better than aberage military space opera wit fun AIs. Its roots go all the way back to E E Doc Smuth.
athomewithbooks's review against another edition
*Disclaimer - I read about 2/3 of this book before giving up. So when I marked it as finished it was more in the sense of "I'm finished with this, I just don't care enough to read more."* The premise of this story seems very interesting - a ship ends up billions of years in the future and the humans need to figure out how to survive in a future with aliens like they've never seen or imagined. Sounds cool, right? Yet I've fallen asleep reading it five times. I love science fiction, and at first I thought maybe I was in a reading funk, or tired. However, attempt after failed attempt to get into this story made me realize that it's just not one that's going to click for me. I couldn't put my finger on what it was about the writing style that failed to hold my attention. I didn't hate it, but I didn't feel it was worth my time and effort at this point to finish reading it.
beaker's review against another edition
4.0
A stellar (pun intended) fiction application of current theories and concepts in physics.
cosmicllama's review against another edition
2.0
See my whole review on The Quill to Live
https://thequilltolive.com/2017/02/23/altered-starscape-conflict-of-disinterest/
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https://thequilltolive.com/2017/02/23/altered-starscape-conflict-of-disinterest/
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