Emma wanders around with other survivors. He sets up the whole weird society well enough, and integrates the people who have been picked up in previous trips, but the plot just sort of shambles along. The red moon, for whatever reason, contains a wide variety of hominid species all living together and while this should be the central mystery, Baxter goes absolutely nowhere with it for a long, long time. Looking back, I'm not quite certain where the book went off the rails. Emma winds up being one of those people and Reid throws together a mad gambit to go up there and rescue her and bring her back. But the book sets up its premise early on, as a weird red moon replaces the actual moon in the sky, also scooping up a bunch of people along the way. This time our hero Reid Malfenant is back (with his wife still alive, Emma sat out the last book due to death, so it's nice to have her along) and as usual he's ticking off NASA. By now, we know the drill, as Baxter reboots everything again and gives us the characters we've seen before, but in different circumstances. The stories may not have been nail-biters but the cosmic vision kept you coming back and made the experience memorable, although you won't achieve any kind of transcendence reading these.
This is the third (and presumably) last book in the "Manifold" trilogy, which so far has been a loose consortium of absolutely fascinating hard science ideas held together by fitfully entertaining plots. Not good, certainly not great, but just "okay." I guess I should elaborate. This was the situation I found myself in reading this book and true to form I did finish reading it only to find that the book was merely okay. And yet, you've invested so much time in it that you feel silly not bothering to finish it and besides, it's not that bad. There's a decent book in here somewhere: Have you ever been a good portion of the way through a book and been faced with the total certainty that it's not going anywhere.
0 kommentar(er)
