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Tabitha Jute #2
Открадни си свят
Космическият капитан Табита Джут е героят на Слънчевата система. Тя е победителката на Капеланските господари и освободителка на гигантския извънземен космически кораб „Изобилие“.
Но триумфът на Табита Джут е краткотраен. Избухват необясними прояви на насилие, назрява всеобщ бунт, започват да изчезват хора. И коя е тъмнокосата саботьорка с дълго черно палто?
Но триумфът на Табита Джут е краткотраен. Избухват необясними прояви на насилие, назрява всеобщ бунт, започват да изчезват хора. И коя е тъмнокосата саботьорка с дълго черно палто?
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
5 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Colin Greenland
44 books77 followersColin Greenland's fiction and criticism have been translated into a dozen languages and broadcast on BBC national radio. His multiple award-winning science fiction novel Take Back Plenty, long out of print in the UK, is available again in the Orion SF Masterworks series, and for e-readers at SF Gateway.
Colin lives in Cambridge and Foolow with his wife Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Piranesi . He is sometimes to be found writing something, goodness knows what.
Colin lives in Cambridge and Foolow with his wife Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Piranesi . He is sometimes to be found writing something, goodness knows what.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 21, 2015
Where
Take Back Plenty
put readers in mind of a certain sub-genre of space opera films while also demonstrating exactly how to pull off space opera as a book genre, Seasons of Plenty mostly just spins its wheels trying to be a movie and disappointing.
There's so much more noise in Seasons—from superfluous detail in otherwise necessary scenes to meaningless scenes to entirely useless whole plotlines—and all of it is gratuitously, often pretentiously unpleasant. While it's clear that that's a deliberate choice made to reflect life on Plenty, it doesn't actually make it a better book—any more than the ham-fisted inclusion of imagery from Alice's Adventures does.
The plot, such as it is, advances without anything meaningful ever happening, the entire cast of characters that carried over from the first book goes from being a sort of loveable band of rogues you wouldn't necessarily want to be friends with to a useless gang of self-sabotaging assholes, the new characters see very little development, and in the end the whole book could have been a single paragraph at the start of the next one with no loss in value.
I freely admit that compared to most space opera, Seasons of Plenty is still quite good, but we're not comparing it to most space opera; we're comparing it to Take Back Plenty. And compared to that, it's mighty disappointing.
There's so much more noise in Seasons—from superfluous detail in otherwise necessary scenes to meaningless scenes to entirely useless whole plotlines—and all of it is gratuitously, often pretentiously unpleasant. While it's clear that that's a deliberate choice made to reflect life on Plenty, it doesn't actually make it a better book—any more than the ham-fisted inclusion of imagery from Alice's Adventures does.
The plot, such as it is, advances without anything meaningful ever happening, the entire cast of characters that carried over from the first book goes from being a sort of loveable band of rogues you wouldn't necessarily want to be friends with to a useless gang of self-sabotaging assholes, the new characters see very little development, and in the end the whole book could have been a single paragraph at the start of the next one with no loss in value.
I freely admit that compared to most space opera, Seasons of Plenty is still quite good, but we're not comparing it to most space opera; we're comparing it to Take Back Plenty. And compared to that, it's mighty disappointing.
April 15, 2010
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1423160.html
Seasons of Plenty has the massive spaceship Plenty, commandeered by Tabitha Jute at the end of the previous book, setting off for (with any luck) Proxima Centauri, loaded with many inhabitants of different communities and factions, and also endowed with a certain life of its own. Not a lot actually happens - there is a feeling of setting the scene for the third book, while just travelling from A to B. It's oddly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the same time, except that Plenty really is a closed social space (which Macondo is not). It's difficult to imagine such an enterprise being quite as anarchic (or indeed diverse) as Greenland paints it, but if you can swallow that premise it is fun.
Seasons of Plenty has the massive spaceship Plenty, commandeered by Tabitha Jute at the end of the previous book, setting off for (with any luck) Proxima Centauri, loaded with many inhabitants of different communities and factions, and also endowed with a certain life of its own. Not a lot actually happens - there is a feeling of setting the scene for the third book, while just travelling from A to B. It's oddly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the same time, except that Plenty really is a closed social space (which Macondo is not). It's difficult to imagine such an enterprise being quite as anarchic (or indeed diverse) as Greenland paints it, but if you can swallow that premise it is fun.
October 31, 2023
This is the sequel to Take Back Plenty, which I enjoyed even if I found it, in many ways, quite flawed. This one seems to have kept all the flaws and dropped all the good features. The main character went from being moderately likeable, if rather stupid, to being obnoxious. It rapidly became tedious, and I quit a third of the way through.
Read
October 23, 2013What a huge waste of time and what an unexpected disappointment. The first book on Tabita Jute was paced, breathless, messy but highly entertaining.
'Seasons of Plenty' however is an absolutely pointless never-ending saga of drugs abuse, more drugs abuse and then some more drugs abuse; insanity on top of insanity layered on insanity; violence left, right and center; inventive and constant cruelty to humans, aliens and animals culminating in no visible 'moral of the story'; pain, murder and death over and over again; disconnected tangled events - total, total disappointment.
It makes me wonder what state the author was in when writing the book and how on earth his publisher decided the book was fit for publishing.
I've been reading science fiction since I was 4yrs old (Kir Bulichov, The Girl From Earth). I guess it is not easy to write books. But perhaps when it is just not happening, the author should leave it be, and go play golf for a while. Then come back a year later and write a book.
'Seasons of Plenty' however is an absolutely pointless never-ending saga of drugs abuse, more drugs abuse and then some more drugs abuse; insanity on top of insanity layered on insanity; violence left, right and center; inventive and constant cruelty to humans, aliens and animals culminating in no visible 'moral of the story'; pain, murder and death over and over again; disconnected tangled events - total, total disappointment.
It makes me wonder what state the author was in when writing the book and how on earth his publisher decided the book was fit for publishing.
I've been reading science fiction since I was 4yrs old (Kir Bulichov, The Girl From Earth). I guess it is not easy to write books. But perhaps when it is just not happening, the author should leave it be, and go play golf for a while. Then come back a year later and write a book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews