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mwplante's review against another edition
5.0
Review for Giants only:
This is the best in the Sunflower Cycle thus far. Mindblowing stack of reveals on reveals on potential reveals on philosophy of mind, all wrapped up in a comprehensible but hard scifi package. Watts is brilliant.
This is the best in the Sunflower Cycle thus far. Mindblowing stack of reveals on reveals on potential reveals on philosophy of mind, all wrapped up in a comprehensible but hard scifi package. Watts is brilliant.
arachnichemist's review against another edition
5.0
4.5 stars. This should be read after The Island or the reader will lose some of the context of the story. This unfolds much like The Island with another nice twist at the end. It isn't quite as good as its predecessor, but still a great read. The problem I have is it leaves me wanting a lot more of this universe. It is just a huge lump of potential that screams standalone novel or a trilogy.
elusivity's review against another edition
4.0
Peter Watts - Giants
Hakim is woken with the one crew left who is still fully connected with the ship AI. They are faced with an unchangeable trajectory into a mesh of a red star tangled with an ice giant. As they go through, risking constant uncertainty and death... something seemingly sentient start to strip the ship's eyes and hammering on its door.
Hakim is woken with the one crew left who is still fully connected with the ship AI. They are faced with an unchangeable trajectory into a mesh of a red star tangled with an ice giant. As they go through, risking constant uncertainty and death... something seemingly sentient start to strip the ship's eyes and hammering on its door.
Spoiler
The main conflict is between Hakim and the protagonist (Viktor Heinwald). Did they weather a genuine life-threatening event together? Or did the AI engineered it, as Hakim suspects, as a way for the AI through Viktor to rebuild trust with the rest of the crew? Is it as Viktor believes, the ship AI is built to be not too smart, and being linked to it simply means a human is augmented with more knowledge and abilities, rather than being overtaken and subsumed by the machine as the others believe and fear.macthekat's review against another edition
3.0
Imagine that, the dead is not really dead, they can talk to you. BUT you can never hold them, never really see them again. They have not magically forgiven you, they have all the same feelings as they had in life. I think that would make the loved ones really conflicted. They would probably still grieve for the child that they lost, but also feel guilty for grieving because their child was still alive. The child would still call them. You would never be able to move on. I should probably also say that I am not a mother. I have not lost anyone closer to me than my grandparents and their deaths didn't hit me all that hard - they had been sick for a long time. So I can not imagine how it would be losing a child.
This was not really a story that was all that enjoyable to read - but it was a story that made me think - a lot.
elusivity's review
4.0
Peter Watts - Giants
Hakim is woken with the one crew left who is still fully connected with the ship AI. They are faced with an unchangeable trajectory into a mesh of a red star tangled with an ice giant. As they go through, risking constant uncertainty and death... something seemingly sentient start to strip the ship's eyes and hammering on its door.
The main conflict is between Hakim and the protagonist (Viktor Heinwald). Did they weather a genuine life-threatening event together? Or did the AI engineered it, as Hakim suspects, as a way for the AI through Viktor to rebuild trust with the rest of the crew? Is it as Viktor believes, the ship AI is built to be not too smart, and being linked to it simply means a human is augmented with more knowledge and abilities, rather than being overtaken and subsumed by the machine as the others believe and fear.
Hakim is woken with the one crew left who is still fully connected with the ship AI. They are faced with an unchangeable trajectory into a mesh of a red star tangled with an ice giant. As they go through, risking constant uncertainty and death... something seemingly sentient start to strip the ship's eyes and hammering on its door.
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