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Phil Leader (619 KP) rated On the Steel Breeze in Books

Nov 21, 2019  
On the Steel Breeze
On the Steel Breeze
Alastair Reynolds | 2014 | Fiction & Poetry
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
On The Steel Breeze is the second in Reynold's Poseidon's Children trilogy and deals with the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.

Taking up the story several years after Blue Remembered Earth the main (human) protagonist is Chiku Akinya, daughter of Sunday Akinya from the first book. She has cloned herself and the three Chikus pursue different fates but their stories inevitably interact with each other.even across light years of space.

One is lost in space, presumed dead. Another is on a colony ship heading to a planet that images have shown has a clearly alien structure on the surface. The third remains on Earth, presumably in safety.

As the colony ships near the destination planet they are riven by internal strife and politics just as Chiku finds that things are not as they seem. There are secrets both within the colony ship and with the planet itself, secrets that are bound to cause conflict when they are brought to light. On earth it is clear that some important information has been hidden and Chiku must risk her safe existence to uncover the truth, but at a high cost.

The book starts slowly, maybe a little too keen to establish who Chiku is and reinforce how the world she inhabits is different from ours. However once the story moves to the colony ships it moves along at a good pace with enough twists and surprises to keep the reader's interest. There is plenty of intrigue and it really is hard to tell where the story is going next.

We have the usual 'hard physics' at work as should be expected in a Reynolds book. Except for the hand wavium 'Chibesa physics' that powers the ships, the laws of physics are rigidly adhered to. Again we see how a battle across millions of miles of space could be achieved.

I found the ending to be satisfying (I have read reviews criticising it). It ties up the story of the earth based Chiku. The story for the colonists is clearly only beginning and the third book in the series is set up neatly in the epilogue, while at the same time providing closure on the fate of the colonists.

My only real criticism of the book (and it in no way detracted from it) was the cloning-and-memory-merging gimmick used for the Chiku clones. Although this neatly allowed the story to move between the colony ships and the solar system, I felt that this had been explored better (and with more justification) in Reynold's novel House Of Suns. Here it just seems to be a 'sci-fieqsue' way of allowing the main protagonists to communicate and empathise across the vast tracts of space and otherwise seemed superfluous given the complex set up.

Overall another excellent book from Reynolds, definitely up there with the best 'space opera' novels. I am looking forward to the third book immensely.
  
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BookblogbyCari (345 KP) rated Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit (Now A Netflix Series) in Books

Mar 10, 2019  
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit (Now A Netflix Series)
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit (Now A Netflix Series)
John Douglas | 2019 | Biography, Crime
8
8.5 (6 Ratings)
Book Rating
Douglas is a show-off
This is hands-down the most action-packed biography I have ever read! And it’s almost the most egotistical and narcissistic sounding biography I have ever read.

In his opening scene in the prologue, Douglas finds himself waking up from a coma in hospital expecting to be tortured by sick criminals, having (almost) single-handily run the FBI’s psychological profiling unit, handling hundreds of cases for several years.

I haven’t had the opportunity to watch the Netflix series based on this book, but I am quite a fan of the Criminal Minds series, so I had an idea of what to expect. However, you need to get 6 chapters in before Douglas starts talking about his work as an FBI profiler. He starts off talking about growing up, his love life, and getting into his career.

Douglas may call himself a profiler, but in my opinion, he is first and foremost a story-teller, with a talent for a drama-filled yarn. And rather than being put off by his constant bragging, I found myself hanging on his every word.

This light and long prelude to the criminal profiling section of the book made the crime details feel all the more gruesome. Some of the predictions made by Douglas about the murderers are barely believable. I mean, how can a crime scene really tell you the age of a murderer or what kind of car he drives?

Unfortunately, Douglas doesn’t offer much explanation into these kinds of things, and the leader is left assuming it’s all down to statistics. And if there’s anywhere the book is let down it would be here, because this would be why readers would pick the book up.

I once read a similar book called The Profiler, by Pat Brown. Brown, however, was a mere spectator to criminal goings on and had no influence whatever on getting criminals brought to justice. Douglas, however, would meet with local police and provide strategies on getting the bad guy, and getting him to confess.

To me, the most crucial chapter was Battle of the Shrinks. It looks at how criminals are dealt with once apprehended. Here Douglas meets with a psychiatrist whose job it was to assess whether criminals can have their sentences shortened and be let off early. This psychiatrist didn’t bother reading police reports to see from an outsider exactly what the criminal had done because he didn’t want to be made biased it and wanted to meet the criminal exactly as they presented himself to him. Douglas was appalled by this attitude and tried to get this over to the psychiatrist, but sadly, to no avail.

In short, this is a very entertaining book, and while it can teach you lot, reading it will never make you as good a profiler as John Douglas himself.