Blue Remembered Earth
Alastair Reynolds
Ace, Jun 5 2012, $26.95
ISBN: 9780441020713
In the latter half of the twenty-second century, Africa is the world’s superpower. For the most part, after barely surviving the Anthropocene climatic change disaster, national hostilities, violent crime and poverty no longer exist as a death from disease or a murder in an outpost in Europe or Australia become featured on the Nairobi news.
In this pristine realm, Geoffrey Akinya relishes his field studies of the elephants of the Amboseli basin. However, his pleasure is disrupted, but not by the death of his space exploring grandma Eunice who was the matriarchal cornerstone of the powerful Akinya business empire. Instead, soon after Eunice’s ashes are scattered on Mt. Kilimanjaro, he is blackmailed into looking at a potentially embarrassing incident on the moon where like elsewhere in the solar system colonization is growing by those who prefer not to reside inside of Earth's Surveyed Zones. He and his sister Sunday’s mission are to insure no scandal erupts, but what they learn about a secret of their grandma shakes their core while this twin cousins Hector and Lucas take a different approach.
This is an exciting futuristic science fiction tale in which the world building is phenomenal though only surfaces when an aberration occurs like a Caucasian or not speaking Swahili although a key element the Mechanism monitoring humans seems to Big Brother intrusive (and too selective). Sunday is the more aggressive of the siblings as they investigate a moon incident that damns their family if surfaced and may destroy their world.
Harriet Klausner
Alastair Reynolds
Ace, Jun 5 2012, $26.95
ISBN: 9780441020713
In the latter half of the twenty-second century, Africa is the world’s superpower. For the most part, after barely surviving the Anthropocene climatic change disaster, national hostilities, violent crime and poverty no longer exist as a death from disease or a murder in an outpost in Europe or Australia become featured on the Nairobi news.
In this pristine realm, Geoffrey Akinya relishes his field studies of the elephants of the Amboseli basin. However, his pleasure is disrupted, but not by the death of his space exploring grandma Eunice who was the matriarchal cornerstone of the powerful Akinya business empire. Instead, soon after Eunice’s ashes are scattered on Mt. Kilimanjaro, he is blackmailed into looking at a potentially embarrassing incident on the moon where like elsewhere in the solar system colonization is growing by those who prefer not to reside inside of Earth's Surveyed Zones. He and his sister Sunday’s mission are to insure no scandal erupts, but what they learn about a secret of their grandma shakes their core while this twin cousins Hector and Lucas take a different approach.
This is an exciting futuristic science fiction tale in which the world building is phenomenal though only surfaces when an aberration occurs like a Caucasian or not speaking Swahili although a key element the Mechanism monitoring humans seems to Big Brother intrusive (and too selective). Sunday is the more aggressive of the siblings as they investigate a moon incident that damns their family if surfaced and may destroy their world.
Harriet Klausner
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