brucehoward's review against another edition
3.0
This was a disappointing follow-on to "Great Sky River", and it was largely pacing that made the early-middle section of the book such a slog. At one point, I started to seriously consider Benford might be paying a kind of snarky homage to bad "Golden Age" science fiction, but eventually (and I do mean eventually), he remembered the story was supposed to be heading somewhere and managed to rescue the storyline from an otherwise ignominious end.
2.5 stars for this book plus an arbitrary .5 stars to inspire readers not to give up on the series itself.
2.5 stars for this book plus an arbitrary .5 stars to inspire readers not to give up on the series itself.
worldsinink's review
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
kstep1805's review against another edition
3.0
I love hard sci-fi because it is grounded in realism, I can almost believe it could come true. What I dislike about hard sci-fi is that it is often written by scientists. Their stories often lack the depth of human emotion that makes for good story telling. This book fits that profile. The storyline is excellent but the story telling was dry.
tome15's review against another edition
4.0
Benford, Gregory. Tides of Light. Galactic Center No. 4. Bantam, 1989.
The collaboration between Gregory Benford and Larry Niven on The Bowl of Heaven in 2012 sparked a discussion between them about the differences between Big Dumb Objects and what they wanted to call the alien object they were building, a Big Smart Object. Benford might have mentioned that in Tides of Light, he had already created several BSOs. If you like epic-scale hard scifi, you can’t do much better than Benford. Tides of Light is a direct sequel to Great Sky River. The Bishop family has escaped from the mechs on Snowglade and reached the preprogrammed destination in their ancient spacecraft. There they find another band of human refugees, a race of cyborg-like aliens, and the Big Smart Objects. If, by some chance, this is your first Galactic Center novel, you might do well to read the chronology at the end first. One big idea here is that it is not always easy to distinguish between life and other varieties of intelligence.
The collaboration between Gregory Benford and Larry Niven on The Bowl of Heaven in 2012 sparked a discussion between them about the differences between Big Dumb Objects and what they wanted to call the alien object they were building, a Big Smart Object. Benford might have mentioned that in Tides of Light, he had already created several BSOs. If you like epic-scale hard scifi, you can’t do much better than Benford. Tides of Light is a direct sequel to Great Sky River. The Bishop family has escaped from the mechs on Snowglade and reached the preprogrammed destination in their ancient spacecraft. There they find another band of human refugees, a race of cyborg-like aliens, and the Big Smart Objects. If, by some chance, this is your first Galactic Center novel, you might do well to read the chronology at the end first. One big idea here is that it is not always easy to distinguish between life and other varieties of intelligence.
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