skylar2's review against another edition
4.0
As others have noted, it's painfully obvious which parts Baxter wrote and which parts Reynolds wrote. The Baxter parts range from jarring to just boring, while Reynolds clearly carries the inspiration. On the whole it's worth reading, though be prepared for homages to a number of Clarke stories in addition to Meeting with Medusa - I picked up on 2001 and the Rama trilogy.
mgomes's review against another edition
4.0
Nice reading, fits nicely with the short story its based upon
justaguy's review
2.0
Not at the best
I’m like my fellow reader mentioned in his review “unappealing and unexciting”. Unfortunately, it is true because of how it was written. Too much time skipping throughout times and wasted time on one from Apollo days. Then with a lack of storyline between 500 years. Or the twist at the ending...even if I did enjoy the idea of evolved machine consciousness. Still, the book was badly on the prep part.
I’m like my fellow reader mentioned in his review “unappealing and unexciting”. Unfortunately, it is true because of how it was written. Too much time skipping throughout times and wasted time on one from Apollo days. Then with a lack of storyline between 500 years. Or the twist at the ending...even if I did enjoy the idea of evolved machine consciousness. Still, the book was badly on the prep part.
wyrmbergmalcolm's review against another edition
3.0
This story spans about 1,000 years and follows a logical progression of human and machine advancement as they colonise and mine the solar system and the inevitable human-machine war. Throughout all this, Howard Falcon is called upon time and time again to try to settle various disputes as he was the one largely responsible for the creation of the machine intelligence. I enjoyed exploring the solar system with him and, though he was a bit of a curmudgeon, found him a highly likeable character.
What makes this story particularly interesting was how the human characters become less and less human and Adam, the main machine featured in the story, become more and more human. This does a reasonably good exploration into the human condition vs AI and what is intelligence, but as this isn’t the focus of the story, it didn’t get bogged down in existential crisis.
Having read a fair bit of both authors now, this one reads a lot more Stephen Baxter than Alastair Reynolds, particularly the interspersed Interlude chapters that feel a lot like Baxter’s NASA series even so far as to have an alternate history and space program.
I haven’t read A Meeting With Medusa and can happily report that it wasn’t necessary to follow and enjoy this story. Compared with the epic scale, the novella is but a prelude.
The ending has a huge call-back to the ending of Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey though does it better in my opinion and far surpasses the twist and the end of the novella.
What makes this story particularly interesting was how the human characters become less and less human and Adam, the main machine featured in the story, become more and more human. This does a reasonably good exploration into the human condition vs AI and what is intelligence, but as this isn’t the focus of the story, it didn’t get bogged down in existential crisis.
Having read a fair bit of both authors now, this one reads a lot more Stephen Baxter than Alastair Reynolds, particularly the interspersed Interlude chapters that feel a lot like Baxter’s NASA series even so far as to have an alternate history and space program.
I haven’t read A Meeting With Medusa and can happily report that it wasn’t necessary to follow and enjoy this story. Compared with the epic scale, the novella is but a prelude.
The ending has a huge call-back to the ending of Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey though does it better in my opinion and far surpasses the twist and the end of the novella.
matosapa's review
4.0
As is usual with these two authors (two of my favorites), this book spans hundreds of years and tackles some interesting questions about speciesism, colonization beyond Earth, etc.
It is a loose sequel to an earlier novella by Clarke (A Meeting with Medusa) but it's not necessary to hunt that story down (long out of print) before reading this. The authors highlight the important bits before diving into their treatment of the world Clarke set up earlier. A brilliant, time-spanning novel about what it means to be human.
It is a loose sequel to an earlier novella by Clarke (A Meeting with Medusa) but it's not necessary to hunt that story down (long out of print) before reading this. The authors highlight the important bits before diving into their treatment of the world Clarke set up earlier. A brilliant, time-spanning novel about what it means to be human.
crystal6's review against another edition
3.0
An interesting and entertaining read, with lots of sciency bits.
Our hero is badly injured in a flying accident, and is now more machine than human. He is despatched on daring missions to other worlds throughout the centuries, (He lives forever thank to technological advances.)
Some parts of the story dragged, but it's a compelling read, with a great twist.
3.5*
Our hero is badly injured in a flying accident, and is now more machine than human. He is despatched on daring missions to other worlds throughout the centuries, (He lives forever thank to technological advances.)
Some parts of the story dragged, but it's a compelling read, with a great twist.
3.5*
markyon's review against another edition
4.0
It takes some nerve to take on a scenario written by a science fiction master. It has been done before – off the top of my head, Brin, Benford & Bear did it with Asimov’s Foundation series, (as the Killer B’s!) and Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson took on Frank Herbert’s Dune series, with varying degrees of success. Even Sir Arthur C Clarke has not been immune to the odd bit of authorial co-working – there’s the Venus Prime series written by Paul Pruess, and the Rama series continued after Rendezvous with Rama (mainly) by Gentry Lee.
The reason for saying this is that The Medusa Chronicles is a sequel (of sorts) to Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C.Clarke, a story with an illustrious past. The original novella was published in Playboy in December 1971. It won the Nebula award in 1972 for Best Novella and the Japanese Seiun Award for Best Foreign Language Short Story in 1974.
The Medusa Chronicles takes place after the events of the novella. Though I re-read the original novella before this novel, the tale is efficiently précised in a few sentences at the beginning of this novel:
“In the 2080’s Howard Falcon is left crippled by the crash of the dirigible Queen Elizabeth IV, of which he was Captain. His life is saved by cyborg surgery.
In the 2090’s Falcon pilots a solo mission in a balloon craft named Kon-Tiki into the upper clouds of Jupiter where he encounters an exotic environment with an ecology dominated by immense ‘herbivorous’ beasts he calls ‘medusae’, which are preyed on by ‘mantas’.
Falcon’s cybernetic surgery has left him with superhuman capabilities but isolated from mankind, for there will be no more such experiments. But Falcon ‘took sombre pride in his unique loneliness – the first immortal midway between two orders of creation. He would be…. an ambassador…between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.’ ”
So: what of this new novel? What surprised me most is that Baxter and Reynolds have managed to achieve something that echoes many of Sir Arthur’s keynotes and then extrapolates from them. So, we have a lot of recognisably ‘Clarkean’ big ideas expounded here – the discovery and emergence of an extra-terrestrial machine society, an expansion of Mankind’s representation into the solar system, for example.
But there’s also a lot of other Clarke reference points here too. There’s his love of the sea and its inhabitants (see also The Deep Range, 1957 and The Ghost from the Grand Banks, 1990), his belief in seeking solutions to crises through peaceful diplomacy, of the importance of ambassadors, presidents and monarchs (eg : Imperial Earth 1975), and his passion for space exploration. Perhaps most of all, the novel shares that idealistic, optimistic idea that in the future Mankind will only become better through negotiation and peaceful co-existence with other intelligences.
As the story begins, it is mere twelve years after the Queen Elizabeth IV incident. Falcon, now existing as a human kept alive by machines, is still clearly angry – especially when he meets other explorers such as Matt Springer, ‘conqueror of Pluto’ who seems to have taken all the fame once accorded Falcon.
When a further accident occurs upon the US naval ship Sam Shore whilst hosting the World President, Falcon finds himself unexpectedly the saviour of the day and unknowingly the originator of the raising of consciousness of the robot Conseil. This has consequences for Falcon and the human race in the future.
As the scale broadens and the passage of time lengthens, the narrative reveals its real purpose – to expand an Olaf Stapledon-ian style view of the future of the human race. We see both the expansion of Humanity into space but also the equally impressive rise of a machine intelligence – one that finally issues to Humans ‘The Jupiter Ultimatum’ – you have five hundred years to leave Earth before we dismantle it ‘for other purposes’.
As Falcon’s lifespan extends into hundreds of years we see, through him, marvellous things – the rise of Humans living on Mercury and Mars, the consequences of the diaspora of Humans forced to leave Earth, huge technological achievements that create that enormous sense of wonder.
We also have, as back story, how Humans got into space in an alternate timeline to our own, reminiscent of Baxter’s own alternative history novels, Voyage & Titan. On this Earth, the US has RFK as President, and unlike our own, much of this space race was due to a grateful world providing money to NASA after a US/USSR joint mission in 1968 deflected an asteroid named Icarus using Apollo rockets to save the Earth. Matt Springer’s grandfather Seth was the spaceman responsible for this, leading to his descendants (and Falcon) being able to travel into space.
In places the books seem very much like Stephen Baxter’s own novels, but as many of these have a Clarkean feel, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This can work well but it is different. Falcon’s bitterness at the beginning of the novel, though understandable, is a characteristic I’m not sure Sir Arthur would’ve used. As time goes on though, Falcon settles into a character more in a Clarke-style. He becomes increasingly observational and separated from the goings on of the solar system, following events with that wry sense of amusement that Sir Arthur often seemed to have in his work. That’s not to say that the critics of Clarke will be appeased, though, for there are still characters that are mere outlines, though Baxter and Reynolds do develop them more than Clarke perhaps would.
Towards the end, the book develops into something BIG – not too dissimilar from parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here the book creates that sense of immenseness, that wondrous joy of revealing a realm of possibilities, the sort of thing that Sir Arthur revelled in. It is good that, in my opinion, Baxter and Reynolds skilfully capture that sensa-wunda tone, so recognisably a feature of Clarke’s writing, beautifully.
In summary, The Medusa Chronicles is a good old-fashioned SF tale, strong on big ideas and filled with sensa-wunda and magical moments. There’s even some genuine surprises. It’s an ambitious if not audacious thing to try, and I’ll happily admit that I am a tough critic of anything connected to one of my favourite authors, who inspired me to read science fiction. My main worry before reading was that it would have been a pastiche of one of my heroes, but instead I found a book produced with respect for one of the genre’s most-loved classic authors. I therefore think it fitting if I say that I think that Sir Arthur would be pleased by this.
A great read that made me want to reread more Clarke.
The reason for saying this is that The Medusa Chronicles is a sequel (of sorts) to Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C.Clarke, a story with an illustrious past. The original novella was published in Playboy in December 1971. It won the Nebula award in 1972 for Best Novella and the Japanese Seiun Award for Best Foreign Language Short Story in 1974.
The Medusa Chronicles takes place after the events of the novella. Though I re-read the original novella before this novel, the tale is efficiently précised in a few sentences at the beginning of this novel:
“In the 2080’s Howard Falcon is left crippled by the crash of the dirigible Queen Elizabeth IV, of which he was Captain. His life is saved by cyborg surgery.
In the 2090’s Falcon pilots a solo mission in a balloon craft named Kon-Tiki into the upper clouds of Jupiter where he encounters an exotic environment with an ecology dominated by immense ‘herbivorous’ beasts he calls ‘medusae’, which are preyed on by ‘mantas’.
Falcon’s cybernetic surgery has left him with superhuman capabilities but isolated from mankind, for there will be no more such experiments. But Falcon ‘took sombre pride in his unique loneliness – the first immortal midway between two orders of creation. He would be…. an ambassador…between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.’ ”
So: what of this new novel? What surprised me most is that Baxter and Reynolds have managed to achieve something that echoes many of Sir Arthur’s keynotes and then extrapolates from them. So, we have a lot of recognisably ‘Clarkean’ big ideas expounded here – the discovery and emergence of an extra-terrestrial machine society, an expansion of Mankind’s representation into the solar system, for example.
But there’s also a lot of other Clarke reference points here too. There’s his love of the sea and its inhabitants (see also The Deep Range, 1957 and The Ghost from the Grand Banks, 1990), his belief in seeking solutions to crises through peaceful diplomacy, of the importance of ambassadors, presidents and monarchs (eg : Imperial Earth 1975), and his passion for space exploration. Perhaps most of all, the novel shares that idealistic, optimistic idea that in the future Mankind will only become better through negotiation and peaceful co-existence with other intelligences.
As the story begins, it is mere twelve years after the Queen Elizabeth IV incident. Falcon, now existing as a human kept alive by machines, is still clearly angry – especially when he meets other explorers such as Matt Springer, ‘conqueror of Pluto’ who seems to have taken all the fame once accorded Falcon.
When a further accident occurs upon the US naval ship Sam Shore whilst hosting the World President, Falcon finds himself unexpectedly the saviour of the day and unknowingly the originator of the raising of consciousness of the robot Conseil. This has consequences for Falcon and the human race in the future.
As the scale broadens and the passage of time lengthens, the narrative reveals its real purpose – to expand an Olaf Stapledon-ian style view of the future of the human race. We see both the expansion of Humanity into space but also the equally impressive rise of a machine intelligence – one that finally issues to Humans ‘The Jupiter Ultimatum’ – you have five hundred years to leave Earth before we dismantle it ‘for other purposes’.
As Falcon’s lifespan extends into hundreds of years we see, through him, marvellous things – the rise of Humans living on Mercury and Mars, the consequences of the diaspora of Humans forced to leave Earth, huge technological achievements that create that enormous sense of wonder.
We also have, as back story, how Humans got into space in an alternate timeline to our own, reminiscent of Baxter’s own alternative history novels, Voyage & Titan. On this Earth, the US has RFK as President, and unlike our own, much of this space race was due to a grateful world providing money to NASA after a US/USSR joint mission in 1968 deflected an asteroid named Icarus using Apollo rockets to save the Earth. Matt Springer’s grandfather Seth was the spaceman responsible for this, leading to his descendants (and Falcon) being able to travel into space.
In places the books seem very much like Stephen Baxter’s own novels, but as many of these have a Clarkean feel, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This can work well but it is different. Falcon’s bitterness at the beginning of the novel, though understandable, is a characteristic I’m not sure Sir Arthur would’ve used. As time goes on though, Falcon settles into a character more in a Clarke-style. He becomes increasingly observational and separated from the goings on of the solar system, following events with that wry sense of amusement that Sir Arthur often seemed to have in his work. That’s not to say that the critics of Clarke will be appeased, though, for there are still characters that are mere outlines, though Baxter and Reynolds do develop them more than Clarke perhaps would.
Towards the end, the book develops into something BIG – not too dissimilar from parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here the book creates that sense of immenseness, that wondrous joy of revealing a realm of possibilities, the sort of thing that Sir Arthur revelled in. It is good that, in my opinion, Baxter and Reynolds skilfully capture that sensa-wunda tone, so recognisably a feature of Clarke’s writing, beautifully.
In summary, The Medusa Chronicles is a good old-fashioned SF tale, strong on big ideas and filled with sensa-wunda and magical moments. There’s even some genuine surprises. It’s an ambitious if not audacious thing to try, and I’ll happily admit that I am a tough critic of anything connected to one of my favourite authors, who inspired me to read science fiction. My main worry before reading was that it would have been a pastiche of one of my heroes, but instead I found a book produced with respect for one of the genre’s most-loved classic authors. I therefore think it fitting if I say that I think that Sir Arthur would be pleased by this.
A great read that made me want to reread more Clarke.
bormgans's review against another edition
1.0
(...)
Enter 2016. Enter Stephen Baxter – an author I haven’t read before, but doesn’t give off the most sophisticated, original vibe if I read up on his books online. Enter a concept designed to sell: team up to write a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa – “perhaps Clarke’s last significant work of short fiction”, as the authors formulate it in the afterword. Team up to enjoy the benefits of the other’s credit. Team up to cash in!
I’m not sure who is responsible for the bulk of this mess, but a mess it is. Slow, cardboard, repetitive, generic.
Exhibit A.
(...)
My advice to Reynolds would be: go back to working as an astrophysicist, and stop publishing a book every year… 15 novels since 2000, excluding short fiction and novellas? Quantity, quality, yada yada yada.
I wanted to quit The Medusa Chronicles after 100 pages, but I'm glad I didn't and pushed trough, as the finale is actually quite alright. The very end however does involve lots of quantum physical mumbo jumbo magic: the ultimate veneer of seriousness in so called Hard SF. The finale doesn't redeem this turd: 60 alright pages in a book of 409 is not the ratio I'm looking for.
(...)
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
Enter 2016. Enter Stephen Baxter – an author I haven’t read before, but doesn’t give off the most sophisticated, original vibe if I read up on his books online. Enter a concept designed to sell: team up to write a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa – “perhaps Clarke’s last significant work of short fiction”, as the authors formulate it in the afterword. Team up to enjoy the benefits of the other’s credit. Team up to cash in!
I’m not sure who is responsible for the bulk of this mess, but a mess it is. Slow, cardboard, repetitive, generic.
Exhibit A.
(...)
My advice to Reynolds would be: go back to working as an astrophysicist, and stop publishing a book every year… 15 novels since 2000, excluding short fiction and novellas? Quantity, quality, yada yada yada.
I wanted to quit The Medusa Chronicles after 100 pages, but I'm glad I didn't and pushed trough, as the finale is actually quite alright. The very end however does involve lots of quantum physical mumbo jumbo magic: the ultimate veneer of seriousness in so called Hard SF. The finale doesn't redeem this turd: 60 alright pages in a book of 409 is not the ratio I'm looking for.
(...)
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
reeka's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
dr_ju's review against another edition
3.0
Reynolds and Baxter walk into a pub. They sit down and one of them says "You start drinking your pint and I write. When you finish it, I drink my pint and you write the next chapter." In the morning they had a novel.
What you get when you mix two science fiction authors, each with their style is what you get when you mix whiskey and beer: completely enjoyable on their own, but leaving you with a complete headache the next morning when combined.
You might get some occasional black-outs, the random encounters with strange people wanting to buy your spleen or to introduce you to a pyramid scheme (sometimes both at the same time; promises of an interesting story were made). You might find yourself a bit tipsy and confused by this book, feeling that you're reading some kind of journal or chronicle with missing pages.
In the beginning there was light and politics. Then in the second day gods created Captain Nemo on Energizer batteries riding the sexier half of a mechanical spider. Nemo was too depressive for his favourite toy broke so gods sent him on vacation on a planet to sunbathe and go fishing. On that planet he befriended some flying intelligent pancakes called Moby Dicks.
By the third half of the book one particular writer whom I won't name but his name rhymes with "despair" was left with no ideas so he borrowed from the Diamond Dogs novel the main idea, while the other writer was juggling with names from mythology into a scifi arena.
The end of the story is either at 80% of the novel or gone in vacation forever, I couldn't say. The characters were some kind of paper clippings cut in half vertically: if you squint hard enough you might see someone. They made me feel extremely detached of everything is wasn't happening there.
I do not think Reynolds and Baxter are poor writers, they are in fact great authors and this was some kind of an experiment where a frankensteinian novel was created. They have each their own style, ideas, universe, motifs I enjoy in their individual creations.
I recommend this book only if you exhausted every other Reynolds and Baxter novel and you're the completitionist kind of reader.
PS. Almost forgot about it, one of the writers really hates people that try to psychoanalyze anyone around; me too.
What you get when you mix two science fiction authors, each with their style is what you get when you mix whiskey and beer: completely enjoyable on their own, but leaving you with a complete headache the next morning when combined.
You might get some occasional black-outs, the random encounters with strange people wanting to buy your spleen or to introduce you to a pyramid scheme (sometimes both at the same time; promises of an interesting story were made). You might find yourself a bit tipsy and confused by this book, feeling that you're reading some kind of journal or chronicle with missing pages.
In the beginning there was light and politics. Then in the second day gods created Captain Nemo on Energizer batteries riding the sexier half of a mechanical spider. Nemo was too depressive for his favourite toy broke so gods sent him on vacation on a planet to sunbathe and go fishing. On that planet he befriended some flying intelligent pancakes called Moby Dicks.
By the third half of the book one particular writer whom I won't name but his name rhymes with "despair" was left with no ideas so he borrowed from the Diamond Dogs novel the main idea, while the other writer was juggling with names from mythology into a scifi arena.
The end of the story is either at 80% of the novel or gone in vacation forever, I couldn't say. The characters were some kind of paper clippings cut in half vertically: if you squint hard enough you might see someone. They made me feel extremely detached of everything is wasn't happening there.
I do not think Reynolds and Baxter are poor writers, they are in fact great authors and this was some kind of an experiment where a frankensteinian novel was created. They have each their own style, ideas, universe, motifs I enjoy in their individual creations.
I recommend this book only if you exhausted every other Reynolds and Baxter novel and you're the completitionist kind of reader.
PS. Almost forgot about it, one of the writers really hates people that try to psychoanalyze anyone around; me too.