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

Nov 21, 2019

On the Steel Breeze

Alastair Reynolds | 2014 | Fiction & Poetry

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.