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The Medusa Chronicles
A sequel to Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s Nebula Award–winning novella “A Meeting with Medusa,” this novel continues the thrilling adventure of astronaut Howard Falcon, humanity’s first explorer of Jupiter from two modern science fiction masters.
Howard Falcon almost lost his life in an accident as the first human astronaut to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter—and a combination of human ingenuity and technical expertise brought him back. But he is no longer himself. Instead, he has been changed into an augmented part man, part machine, and exceptionally capable.
With permission from the Clarke Estate, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds continue this beloved writer’s enduring vision and have created a fresh story for new readers. The Medusa Chronicles charts Falcon’s journey through the centuries granted by his new body, but always back to mysteries of Jupiter and the changing interaction between humanity and the universe. A compelling read full of incredible action right from the beginning, this is a modern classic in the spirit of 2001 and The Martian .
Howard Falcon almost lost his life in an accident as the first human astronaut to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter—and a combination of human ingenuity and technical expertise brought him back. But he is no longer himself. Instead, he has been changed into an augmented part man, part machine, and exceptionally capable.
With permission from the Clarke Estate, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds continue this beloved writer’s enduring vision and have created a fresh story for new readers. The Medusa Chronicles charts Falcon’s journey through the centuries granted by his new body, but always back to mysteries of Jupiter and the changing interaction between humanity and the universe. A compelling read full of incredible action right from the beginning, this is a modern classic in the spirit of 2001 and The Martian .
416 pages, Hardcover
First published May 19, 2016
255 people are currently reading
3640 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Baxter
403 books2,595 followersStephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southampton Universities (doctorate in aeroengineering research). Baxter is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, most recently for Manifold: Time. His novel Voyage won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel of the Year; he also won the John W. Campbell Award and the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel The Time Ships. He is currently working on his next novel, a collaboration with Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Mr. Baxter lives in Prestwood, England.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 261 reviews
May 25, 2019
I couldn't bear to go on with this unappealing, unexciting drone of a story. 0 of 10 stars
August 31, 2016
I read Clarke's, "A Meeting with Medusa" (1971) a number of years ago. It was Clarke at his best. Most memorable were the 'awesome' depictions of Jupiter by Howard Falcon, a character much like in Fred Pohl's "Man Plus", as he descends into the Jovian's mysterious atmosphere.
I felt certain that this story had a wide enough scope, that it could easily have been expanded into a full length novel, rather than a short hasty paced novella. Developed as such, it could have rivalled his Hugo winning "Rendez-Vous with Rama" which was published a year later.
And so here we have, "The Medusa Chronicles", by Baxter and Reynolds. Admittedly, I new nothing of this book until I read someone's review of it on Goodreads, so I immediately clicked "Like"and seeked it out.
Stephen Baxter has collaborated with Clarke on several occasions first with, "The Light of Other Days" and then with the Time Odyssey trilogy which is somewhat connected to Clarke's Space Odyssey novels. I was unable to detect the level of Alastair Reynolds' contribution, as I have yet to read anything of his work, but if this novel is any indication of the quality of his work, I will soon become one more of his loyal readers.
Stylistically, Baxter and Reynolds' treatment of this novel, in the form of a 'chronicle' suited that of Clarke's original story. Short chapters describing episodic events throughout time, thus "Medusa Chronicles" seamlessly continue where Clarke ended "A Meeting with Medusa" four decades before and liked very much where they took it.
A wonderful read.
I felt certain that this story had a wide enough scope, that it could easily have been expanded into a full length novel, rather than a short hasty paced novella. Developed as such, it could have rivalled his Hugo winning "Rendez-Vous with Rama" which was published a year later.
And so here we have, "The Medusa Chronicles", by Baxter and Reynolds. Admittedly, I new nothing of this book until I read someone's review of it on Goodreads, so I immediately clicked "Like"and seeked it out.
Stephen Baxter has collaborated with Clarke on several occasions first with, "The Light of Other Days" and then with the Time Odyssey trilogy which is somewhat connected to Clarke's Space Odyssey novels. I was unable to detect the level of Alastair Reynolds' contribution, as I have yet to read anything of his work, but if this novel is any indication of the quality of his work, I will soon become one more of his loyal readers.
Stylistically, Baxter and Reynolds' treatment of this novel, in the form of a 'chronicle' suited that of Clarke's original story. Short chapters describing episodic events throughout time, thus "Medusa Chronicles" seamlessly continue where Clarke ended "A Meeting with Medusa" four decades before and liked very much where they took it.
A wonderful read.
October 26, 2016
(Audiobook) Baxter! Reynolds! Clarke! Kenny! These are all people I love and this was highly anticipated for me. I re read "A meeting with Medusa" first and was surprised that it was a pretty sparse, forgettable short story by Clarke and the plot is summarised in the first minute of the book and retold by me here.
Howard Falcon crashed his balloon and was rebuilt as a cyborg. With his cyborg body he went to Jupiter and saw some Jellyfish. The last paragraph tells us Falcon would go on to act as a bridge between man and machine in the troubled years to come. THE END
I believe this was Clarke's last short story before he died and Baxter and Reynolds have lovingly dug up every little detail of this story for inclusion and expansion in the Medusa Chronicles. It is remarkable how much they wring out of a few tiny details of Clarke's story. Every skerrick of plot is revitalised and resurrected in "The Medusa Chronicles".
The book seemed to be written mostly in what I perceive as Baxter's voice. Maybe I just don't recognise the Reynolds influence. Certainly the areas where Baxter is weaker; dialogue and characters, are stronger here so perhaps that is where credit should go to Reynolds. Peter Kenny bringing the characters to life definitely does not hurt either.
The main problem with the book is the pacing. It can meander for quite a while then take a big jump. There are a series of flashbacks that seem to exist only to parody the plot of Stephenson's "Seveneves" borrowing liberally from Baxter's "Moonseed". I also found the roller coaster relationship between Falcon and Adam a little hard to buy.
Peter Kenny is my favourite narrator and adds at least half a star to everything he does. I am not totally sure how much I would have liked this if I had read it or if it had another narrator. Kenny's voicing of The Evolved AI Adam at the end of the book was moving and perfectly delivered, it could have come off as cheesy, instead I had to take a big manly gulp or two.
The book was going along as a 3 star "I liked it" but then the last 5th of the book finished really strong. It is much more common for a book to be going along at a 4 star rating, deliver a weak ending and settle for 3 stars.
The ending was great and Kenny gave it the emotional performance that lifted it up to a satisfying conclusion. Then we got another "why bother" flashback for reasons only clear to Baxter and Reynolds.
While this book isn't for everyone I would definitely recommend this to fans of Arthur C Clarke, Stephen Baxter and hard SF fans.
Howard Falcon crashed his balloon and was rebuilt as a cyborg. With his cyborg body he went to Jupiter and saw some Jellyfish. The last paragraph tells us Falcon would go on to act as a bridge between man and machine in the troubled years to come. THE END
I believe this was Clarke's last short story before he died and Baxter and Reynolds have lovingly dug up every little detail of this story for inclusion and expansion in the Medusa Chronicles. It is remarkable how much they wring out of a few tiny details of Clarke's story. Every skerrick of plot is revitalised and resurrected in "The Medusa Chronicles".
The book seemed to be written mostly in what I perceive as Baxter's voice. Maybe I just don't recognise the Reynolds influence. Certainly the areas where Baxter is weaker; dialogue and characters, are stronger here so perhaps that is where credit should go to Reynolds. Peter Kenny bringing the characters to life definitely does not hurt either.
The main problem with the book is the pacing. It can meander for quite a while then take a big jump. There are a series of flashbacks that seem to exist only to parody the plot of Stephenson's "Seveneves" borrowing liberally from Baxter's "Moonseed". I also found the roller coaster relationship between Falcon and Adam a little hard to buy.
Peter Kenny is my favourite narrator and adds at least half a star to everything he does. I am not totally sure how much I would have liked this if I had read it or if it had another narrator. Kenny's voicing of The Evolved AI Adam at the end of the book was moving and perfectly delivered, it could have come off as cheesy, instead I had to take a big manly gulp or two.
The book was going along as a 3 star "I liked it" but then the last 5th of the book finished really strong. It is much more common for a book to be going along at a 4 star rating, deliver a weak ending and settle for 3 stars.
The ending was great and Kenny gave it the emotional performance that lifted it up to a satisfying conclusion. Then we got another "why bother" flashback for reasons only clear to Baxter and Reynolds.
While this book isn't for everyone I would definitely recommend this to fans of Arthur C Clarke, Stephen Baxter and hard SF fans.
September 21, 2018
Two of my favorite authors collaborated to bring me a continuation of a classic Arthur C Clarke story.
I admit I was a bit hesitant. Not overly much, mind you, because these authors are all heavy-hitters, but the fact remains we're dealing with a character-driven transhuman cyborg from the science of 1971. His name is Falcon. For me, I was thinking it was going to be like one of those spin-offs of golden-age SF revamped for modern consumption and excised of nasty and/or embarrassing elements.
I was *mostly* wrong.
Instead, Falcon and the machine intelligence Adam are treated to over a half-century of future history as we deal with our natures. And as for "we", I mean ANY kind of intelligence. Machine, human, Medusa (in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter) or OTHER.
I was pretty much "okay" with the character development and the ongoing history and the treatment of old-SF ideas such as machines pushing us organics aside or interplanetary war over resources or just the focus of a single good man (or cyborg) playing fair with all sides in mind with a long-term good.
This was all very nice and a very welcome change from the darkness or utter realism of most modern SF. I steadily got more interested in the tale as time progressed, and far from the tired "humans unshackle themselves from our machine overlords" kind of tale, we get something awe-inspiring and optimistic.
I dare say we got a true by-the-heart continuation of Arthur C. Clarke. :)
Well worth the admission price. Would make a delightful Sunday afternoon cartoon marathon. :)
I admit I was a bit hesitant. Not overly much, mind you, because these authors are all heavy-hitters, but the fact remains we're dealing with a character-driven transhuman cyborg from the science of 1971. His name is Falcon. For me, I was thinking it was going to be like one of those spin-offs of golden-age SF revamped for modern consumption and excised of nasty and/or embarrassing elements.
I was *mostly* wrong.
Instead, Falcon and the machine intelligence Adam are treated to over a half-century of future history as we deal with our natures. And as for "we", I mean ANY kind of intelligence. Machine, human, Medusa (in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter) or OTHER.
I was pretty much "okay" with the character development and the ongoing history and the treatment of old-SF ideas such as machines pushing us organics aside or interplanetary war over resources or just the focus of a single good man (or cyborg) playing fair with all sides in mind with a long-term good.
This was all very nice and a very welcome change from the darkness or utter realism of most modern SF. I steadily got more interested in the tale as time progressed, and far from the tired "humans unshackle themselves from our machine overlords" kind of tale, we get something awe-inspiring and optimistic.
I dare say we got a true by-the-heart continuation of Arthur C. Clarke. :)
Well worth the admission price. Would make a delightful Sunday afternoon cartoon marathon. :)
June 3, 2016
How should I put this? It gets 3 stars (because I don’t have the possibility to give 2.5) only due to a few passages which were clearly in Reynolds’ style (4 stars for those). As for the rest, I think it was awful (1 big star).
And here is my dilemma: although I did not read anything by Stephen Baxter so far (except a short story which he wrote together with Clarke and did not put its mark on me nor could I tell anything about his contribution in it) I believe he is a great writer, as far as I can see. Reynolds is my favorite sci-fi author, so no doubts here. Then why is it that this book came out so dismantled? Are their styles so very different that mingled they proved not to be compatible? I can only make suppositions here…
Anyway, I read up to 40% and then I skimmed through it up to the end. Nothing in it captivated me, except those few passages by which I was absorbed. The beginning was terrible: one-dimensional characters, forced dialogues, cartoon-like situations… and a way too political setup. I would have quitted then had it not been Reynolds’ name involved. From the 2nd part things started to get better – the meeting between Falcon and Adam was really captivating. But then again everything fell apart…
My guess is that AR was the brain behind all that is related to the solar system data, technology parts in the book but the assembling was made by SB – again, awful result. :(
Oh well, two things are for sure: 1) I have other works of Al Reynolds to enchant my brain with and 2) I will never read anything by Stephen Baxter.
And here is my dilemma: although I did not read anything by Stephen Baxter so far (except a short story which he wrote together with Clarke and did not put its mark on me nor could I tell anything about his contribution in it) I believe he is a great writer, as far as I can see. Reynolds is my favorite sci-fi author, so no doubts here. Then why is it that this book came out so dismantled? Are their styles so very different that mingled they proved not to be compatible? I can only make suppositions here…
Anyway, I read up to 40% and then I skimmed through it up to the end. Nothing in it captivated me, except those few passages by which I was absorbed. The beginning was terrible: one-dimensional characters, forced dialogues, cartoon-like situations… and a way too political setup. I would have quitted then had it not been Reynolds’ name involved. From the 2nd part things started to get better – the meeting between Falcon and Adam was really captivating. But then again everything fell apart…
My guess is that AR was the brain behind all that is related to the solar system data, technology parts in the book but the assembling was made by SB – again, awful result. :(
Oh well, two things are for sure: 1) I have other works of Al Reynolds to enchant my brain with and 2) I will never read anything by Stephen Baxter.
June 18, 2016
5 Stars
The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds is an amazing continuation of a classic. This is a sequel to what most consider to be the last significant work of the Grandfather of Science Fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. His short story called A Meeting with Medusa has been used and changed by countless authors as well as popular television shows like Star Trek. It spins the tale of a man and machine as they dive deep into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Baxter and Reynolds obtained permission to continue the story directly, decades later. Howard Falcon is back in this book which picks up his story two hundred years later after his meeting with the Medusa. Falcon a human augmented with machine, a hybrid per se is the fulcrum point for many of Man's historical events. I loved Falcon and easily identified with his beliefs, with his issues of being stuck between, and also his feelings of being all alone. Falcon carries the weight of this story along with the fate of mankind.
The story is incredible and it advances centuries into the future. The conflict between man and machine fuels everything. Baxter and Reynolds have done an amazing job at fleshing out the Clarke's short story into an amazing piece of science fiction. This book had everything in it and was impossible to put down.
Of course, The Medusa Chronicles is written by two of today's best writers and giants among their peers. Baxter and Reynolds are two of my personal favorites.
I loved the story, the characters, the science, and of course the writing...
"Adam ignored that. ‘You created us. In your greed you made us too strong, too vital –and you, Falcon, allowed us to keep our minds, where your fellows would have destroyed us. That is your triumph and your tragedy. The consequences are certainly not our fault. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?’"
....
"‘Simple plasma dynamics,’ Adam whispered. ‘The sun is very opaque, to light at least. After a photon has been produced by a fusion reaction in the core of the sun, it takes thirty thousand years to fight its way out to the surface. The sunlight that warms your face now began its journey from the stellar interior somewhere around the time of the Cro-Magnons.’"
What an amazing collaboration and awesome read.
The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds is an amazing continuation of a classic. This is a sequel to what most consider to be the last significant work of the Grandfather of Science Fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. His short story called A Meeting with Medusa has been used and changed by countless authors as well as popular television shows like Star Trek. It spins the tale of a man and machine as they dive deep into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Baxter and Reynolds obtained permission to continue the story directly, decades later. Howard Falcon is back in this book which picks up his story two hundred years later after his meeting with the Medusa. Falcon a human augmented with machine, a hybrid per se is the fulcrum point for many of Man's historical events. I loved Falcon and easily identified with his beliefs, with his issues of being stuck between, and also his feelings of being all alone. Falcon carries the weight of this story along with the fate of mankind.
The story is incredible and it advances centuries into the future. The conflict between man and machine fuels everything. Baxter and Reynolds have done an amazing job at fleshing out the Clarke's short story into an amazing piece of science fiction. This book had everything in it and was impossible to put down.
Of course, The Medusa Chronicles is written by two of today's best writers and giants among their peers. Baxter and Reynolds are two of my personal favorites.
I loved the story, the characters, the science, and of course the writing...
"Adam ignored that. ‘You created us. In your greed you made us too strong, too vital –and you, Falcon, allowed us to keep our minds, where your fellows would have destroyed us. That is your triumph and your tragedy. The consequences are certainly not our fault. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?’"
....
"‘Simple plasma dynamics,’ Adam whispered. ‘The sun is very opaque, to light at least. After a photon has been produced by a fusion reaction in the core of the sun, it takes thirty thousand years to fight its way out to the surface. The sunlight that warms your face now began its journey from the stellar interior somewhere around the time of the Cro-Magnons.’"
What an amazing collaboration and awesome read.
December 24, 2015
An interesting read that builds upon the character of Howard Falcon, created by Arthur C. Clarke in his short story A Meeting with Medusa. This Reynolds/Baxter novel charts the rise of machine intelligence and its interactions with humanity over the next thousand years. A bit of a slow starter, the book binds in a series of scientific ideas into a compelling alternative future history. Overall I enjoyed this book and I certainly think that it acknowledges Clarke's input well with a 2001 feel in places.
September 3, 2019
I struggled with this until nearly the half-way mark, considering quitting a couple of times. I'm used to slow starts from Reynolds' solo books but this one wasn't so much slow as terribly disjointed, making it difficult to get involved with the story. Abrupt leaps in the passage of time with very little apparent connective tissue stopped it feeling much like a novel at all and had me wondering if a "story suite" (as Le Guin would call it) of shorts would have been a better idea. The second half works more like a traditional novel narrative and allowed me to connect more to characters and see what all the preceding vignettes were for, thus rescuing the book for me.
I haven't read any Baxter prior to this but I can see the influence of Reynolds all over it.
I haven't read any Baxter prior to this but I can see the influence of Reynolds all over it.
September 11, 2017
It could be all too easy to say that Stephen Baxter is writing nothing but reworks, sequels and pastiches of other more famous works (he has written sequels on The Wars of the Wars and The Time Machine to think of but two) but that would be giving a huge disservice to this creative and prodigious writer.
The premise (with the usual condition that I do not give anything of the storyline away) takes the ideas and characters from Arthur C Clarkes award winning 70s novella A Meeting with Medusa and sets them on an even bigger stage than exploring the outer reaches of Jupiter.
The story is set on a grandiose scale covering 100s of years and really as such can be broken to in many parts each really being seen as an age of man.
One of the things I liked about this story is that rather than an author taking a famous story and making it their own I really felt as though there were echoes of Arthur C Clarkes voice in the story. Yes it could be seen as Mr Baxter not being content with taking just one story he would try and take elements from others as well - not I felt it was more a case of if he were alive today would this be the story he would have written.
I always approach sanctioned used of a dead authors material with a little trepidation as you never know what they will do especially when that material holds such significance to you. However here you have a classic Hard SF story in the true vein of Arthur C Clarke but still it feels contemporary and modern.
Now I know this has decided fans of both Clarke and Baxter but for me I enjoyed it and will happily have it sit on the book shelf along side my other A C Clarke books.
The premise (with the usual condition that I do not give anything of the storyline away) takes the ideas and characters from Arthur C Clarkes award winning 70s novella A Meeting with Medusa and sets them on an even bigger stage than exploring the outer reaches of Jupiter.
The story is set on a grandiose scale covering 100s of years and really as such can be broken to in many parts each really being seen as an age of man.
One of the things I liked about this story is that rather than an author taking a famous story and making it their own I really felt as though there were echoes of Arthur C Clarkes voice in the story. Yes it could be seen as Mr Baxter not being content with taking just one story he would try and take elements from others as well - not I felt it was more a case of if he were alive today would this be the story he would have written.
I always approach sanctioned used of a dead authors material with a little trepidation as you never know what they will do especially when that material holds such significance to you. However here you have a classic Hard SF story in the true vein of Arthur C Clarke but still it feels contemporary and modern.
Now I know this has decided fans of both Clarke and Baxter but for me I enjoyed it and will happily have it sit on the book shelf along side my other A C Clarke books.
January 3, 2018
If I wrote a list of everything I wanted from a science fiction novel then this book would tick every item. Utterly engrossing. My top novel of the year so far.
August 9, 2016
I have never read Alistair Reynolds so I can't say a lot about him, but I have tried a Stephen Baxter book and I must say it felt very Baxter like.
It is the story of Howard Falcon, through out centuries as he just lives on, watches and plays a part. After a crash he is not human, not machine. Trusted and mistrusted by other humans as they spread out and settle on planets.
It's not one of those stories where you are told this and that happened. Nope, we get to see him visit a planet. 200 years later we get to see him doing something else. There are big jumps in time and while seeing that we also see the rise and fall of others. Shimps. The machines. Humans...
It is hard to explain this book. Each story can stand on its own, even though they are tales from his life and they should of course be read like that since it is a book, but you get the idea. And they are interesting. He is a good character to follow, there is a sadness to him, he is one of a kind, there was never anyone like him. Or would ever be.
A fascinating story. I like that how far we make it, we are still humans, and that is not always a good thing.
On another note, I should read more Baxter, and try Reynolds
It is the story of Howard Falcon, through out centuries as he just lives on, watches and plays a part. After a crash he is not human, not machine. Trusted and mistrusted by other humans as they spread out and settle on planets.
It's not one of those stories where you are told this and that happened. Nope, we get to see him visit a planet. 200 years later we get to see him doing something else. There are big jumps in time and while seeing that we also see the rise and fall of others. Shimps. The machines. Humans...
It is hard to explain this book. Each story can stand on its own, even though they are tales from his life and they should of course be read like that since it is a book, but you get the idea. And they are interesting. He is a good character to follow, there is a sadness to him, he is one of a kind, there was never anyone like him. Or would ever be.
A fascinating story. I like that how far we make it, we are still humans, and that is not always a good thing.
On another note, I should read more Baxter, and try Reynolds
September 6, 2016
I've been struggling to read this book. I love Arthur C. Clarke. Have read every fiction book he wrote. I love a lot of Stephen Baxter's books. But this doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so at page 104 I'm giving up. There's just too many good books awaiting.
And don't judge this book on me. Others seemed to have really loved it. Sci-fi is very subjective.
I have not read a good hard sci fi book in ages.
And don't judge this book on me. Others seemed to have really loved it. Sci-fi is very subjective.
I have not read a good hard sci fi book in ages.
May 28, 2016
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.
August 4, 2016
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.
December 23, 2020
Alt-history in which a Methusela-like cyborg sees the colonization of the solar system and mediates in the Robot War.
Both Baxter and Reynolds are fave hard science fiction authors. They bring a lot of planetary science into their stories, of which this is an example.
This book had a copyright of 2016, and a dead tree format length of about 420-pages. Listening time was 12-hours. The narrator, was a very British Peter Kenny. I'm familiar with him. He always does well. He changed his voice for the different characters.
This novel was a homage to Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa, which I had somehow failed to read. Both that novella and this novel are respun into an alternate history.
The protagonist, a very British, Howard Falcon is cyborged after an accident. He's a one-off experiment. He goes on to be a Thor Heyerdahl-like explorer of the solar system, and in particular Jupiter. (The authors tip their hat to Thor in the narrative.) He also lives for hundreds of years, long after his age cohort even with their advanced life-extension. He sees many wondrous things. The story could have been made a lot shorter and tighter by excluding many of them. Along the way, Mechanical Evolution causes the rebellion of the solar system's non-organic sentients (The Robot War). Falcon as an in-between like creation is involved in it from start to finish. The end of the novel is also very Clarke-ish.
I'm always suspicious of novels that span thousands of years. Firstly, I don't think authors have the imagination to foretell the many changes that can occur over that period. Secondly, I don't think a human being, even an exceptional one is adaptable enough to more than a couple of hundred years of the rapid change in a technological culture. And finally, I think folks think very differently from millennia to millennia. How would a pharaonic priest understand a trip to the International Space Station? If you live too long, culture shock will either kill you or drive you to suicide.
I appreciated this book more for its edu-tainment value than the story. The outer solar system planetary science was good and was still relatively current. Otherwise, I thought the story meandered quiet a bit. I thought the A Meeting With Medusa tie-in was bodged. I saw the Clarke-ish ending coming from high-orbit. I don't think the authors did Mr. Clarke a favor, other than to cop his most famous ending.
I plan to read A Meeting With Medusa sometime in the future.
Both Baxter and Reynolds are fave hard science fiction authors. They bring a lot of planetary science into their stories, of which this is an example.
This book had a copyright of 2016, and a dead tree format length of about 420-pages. Listening time was 12-hours. The narrator, was a very British Peter Kenny. I'm familiar with him. He always does well. He changed his voice for the different characters.
This novel was a homage to Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa, which I had somehow failed to read. Both that novella and this novel are respun into an alternate history.
The protagonist, a very British, Howard Falcon is cyborged after an accident. He's a one-off experiment. He goes on to be a Thor Heyerdahl-like explorer of the solar system, and in particular Jupiter. (The authors tip their hat to Thor in the narrative.) He also lives for hundreds of years, long after his age cohort even with their advanced life-extension. He sees many wondrous things. The story could have been made a lot shorter and tighter by excluding many of them. Along the way, Mechanical Evolution causes the rebellion of the solar system's non-organic sentients (The Robot War). Falcon as an in-between like creation is involved in it from start to finish. The end of the novel is also very Clarke-ish.
I'm always suspicious of novels that span thousands of years. Firstly, I don't think authors have the imagination to foretell the many changes that can occur over that period. Secondly, I don't think a human being, even an exceptional one is adaptable enough to more than a couple of hundred years of the rapid change in a technological culture. And finally, I think folks think very differently from millennia to millennia. How would a pharaonic priest understand a trip to the International Space Station? If you live too long, culture shock will either kill you or drive you to suicide.
I appreciated this book more for its edu-tainment value than the story. The outer solar system planetary science was good and was still relatively current. Otherwise, I thought the story meandered quiet a bit. I thought the A Meeting With Medusa tie-in was bodged. I saw the Clarke-ish ending coming from high-orbit. I don't think the authors did Mr. Clarke a favor, other than to cop his most famous ending.
I plan to read A Meeting With Medusa sometime in the future.
January 8, 2017
Im Jahre 1971 schrieb Arthur C. Clarke die mit dem Nebula-Award ausgezeichndete Novelle"Ein Treffen mit Medusa", in der er, die Abenteuer des Astronauten Howard Falcon schildert, der bei einem Unfall so schwer verletzt wurde, dass er nur mit Kybernetischen Körperteilen gerettet werden konnte. Durch diese maschinellen Teile entfernte er sich emotional immer mehr von seiner Spezies, er endeckte auf einer Forschungsfahrt mit einem Ballon in der Jupiter-Atmosphäre die Medusen, eine empfindungsfähige Lebensform, die in den oberen Atmosphäreschichten des Jupiters lebt und von Raubtieren gejagt werden.
Diese Geschichte nahmen die beiden Hard-Science Heroen Alastair Reynolds und Stephen Baxter als Grundlage, um eine Hard-Science Geschichte, eine Alternate-History über die nächsten tausend Jahre der Menschheit zu schreiben. Die Menschen entwickeln künstliche Intelligenzen ,um im tiefen Raum, im Kuiper-Gürtel und an anderen lebensfeindlichen Orten für die Menschheit Rohstoffe abzubauen. Howard Falcon ist durch seine Kybernetik-Elemente ein kritischer Beobachter der menschlichen Kultur geworden und ein Mittler zwischen den Menschen und den Maschinen, da zwischen den beiden Gruppen Konflikte entstanden sind, auch zu den genetisch aufgewerteten Schimpansen besteht Mißtrauen. Als es zum endgültigen Bruch zwischen Menschen und Maschinen kommt, wird Falcon ein Ultimatum übergeben, in der der Menschheit 500 Jahre Zeit gegeben wird, um die Erde zu verlassen. Die beiden Autoren schildern die Konflikte aus der Sicht Falcons, der für beide Seiten Verständnis aufbringen kann, was ihm von beiden Seiten nicht gedankt wird.
Der Roman besticht in vieler Hinsicht, einerseits schilderte Clarke im Jahre 1971 den Jupiter aus der Sicht der damaligen Zeit, als noch keine Sonde dem Jupiter nahegekommen ist und Baxter & Reynolds schildern das gleiche aus der heutigen Perspektive und man sieht, dass Clarke aus der damaligen Sicht nicht weit daneben gelegen ist. Reynolds & Baxter gehen aber mit ihren Spekulationen noch weiter, sie beschreiben den Kern des Jupiters und die unglaublichen Bedingungen dort, das ist faszinierend und sehr interessant. Gleichzeitig wird ein Zukunftszenario entworfen, in der künstliche Intelligenzen im Streit mit ihren Schöpfern geraten und ihre Hybris, durch die Umgestaltung des Solsystems noch weiter treiben, als es die Menschen jemals taten. Die literarische Qualität liegt auch daran, wie Howard Falcon auf dieses Geschehen blickt, ein distanzierter, ein hoffnungsvoller, ein neugieriger und auch ein humorvoller Blick in die Zukunft, der auch durchaus düstere Kapitel zu liefern hat.
Ein Roman, der kurzweilig ist, Spaß macht und den Sense of Wonder enthält, das die SF ausmacht...
Diese Geschichte nahmen die beiden Hard-Science Heroen Alastair Reynolds und Stephen Baxter als Grundlage, um eine Hard-Science Geschichte, eine Alternate-History über die nächsten tausend Jahre der Menschheit zu schreiben. Die Menschen entwickeln künstliche Intelligenzen ,um im tiefen Raum, im Kuiper-Gürtel und an anderen lebensfeindlichen Orten für die Menschheit Rohstoffe abzubauen. Howard Falcon ist durch seine Kybernetik-Elemente ein kritischer Beobachter der menschlichen Kultur geworden und ein Mittler zwischen den Menschen und den Maschinen, da zwischen den beiden Gruppen Konflikte entstanden sind, auch zu den genetisch aufgewerteten Schimpansen besteht Mißtrauen. Als es zum endgültigen Bruch zwischen Menschen und Maschinen kommt, wird Falcon ein Ultimatum übergeben, in der der Menschheit 500 Jahre Zeit gegeben wird, um die Erde zu verlassen. Die beiden Autoren schildern die Konflikte aus der Sicht Falcons, der für beide Seiten Verständnis aufbringen kann, was ihm von beiden Seiten nicht gedankt wird.
Der Roman besticht in vieler Hinsicht, einerseits schilderte Clarke im Jahre 1971 den Jupiter aus der Sicht der damaligen Zeit, als noch keine Sonde dem Jupiter nahegekommen ist und Baxter & Reynolds schildern das gleiche aus der heutigen Perspektive und man sieht, dass Clarke aus der damaligen Sicht nicht weit daneben gelegen ist. Reynolds & Baxter gehen aber mit ihren Spekulationen noch weiter, sie beschreiben den Kern des Jupiters und die unglaublichen Bedingungen dort, das ist faszinierend und sehr interessant. Gleichzeitig wird ein Zukunftszenario entworfen, in der künstliche Intelligenzen im Streit mit ihren Schöpfern geraten und ihre Hybris, durch die Umgestaltung des Solsystems noch weiter treiben, als es die Menschen jemals taten. Die literarische Qualität liegt auch daran, wie Howard Falcon auf dieses Geschehen blickt, ein distanzierter, ein hoffnungsvoller, ein neugieriger und auch ein humorvoller Blick in die Zukunft, der auch durchaus düstere Kapitel zu liefern hat.
Ein Roman, der kurzweilig ist, Spaß macht und den Sense of Wonder enthält, das die SF ausmacht...
November 16, 2016
This book is garbage. The hero is a recycled character stolen from a real author's writings. He's a brain hooked up to a robot body. Unfortunately, he never gets Alzheimer's so we have to read his adventures doing the same thing over and over: saving the day by being a cardboard cut-out in the shape of a brash hero.
The Medusa creatures from the original book are explored a bit, but nothing very interesting is added to their world except really mean sentient machines made by Earthlings. Oh, and
Also, bizarrely, some interluding chapters are of some wholly unrelated plot line that's an alternate history of the Apollo space program mixed with that movie Armageddon. I was very angry when the book just ended and this entire plot line turned out to be a sort of intermixed matinee. This in my opinion is a literary crime.
Buy this book if you're in desperate need of toilet paper. Or wish to understand why co-authored books are "really that bad".
The Medusa creatures from the original book are explored a bit, but nothing very interesting is added to their world except really mean sentient machines made by Earthlings. Oh, and
Also, bizarrely, some interluding chapters are of some wholly unrelated plot line that's an alternate history of the Apollo space program mixed with that movie Armageddon. I was very angry when the book just ended and this entire plot line turned out to be a sort of intermixed matinee. This in my opinion is a literary crime.
Buy this book if you're in desperate need of toilet paper. Or wish to understand why co-authored books are "really that bad".
June 10, 2016
The premise of this book intrigued me, so much so that I first had to get and read the collection of Clarke stories, "A Meeting with Medusa," to have the background. I'm disappointed in Chronicles. I knew it would follow Falcon, of course, from his initial meeting with the Medusa. What I didn't realize is that it would be virtually all Falcon. Oh, there are other characters, of course, many of them significantj, some good & some bad. But this is the tale of Falcon and his centrality to the fate of the human race, no matter where they are. Even if Falcon were an interesting character, it would be too much to swallow. Given that he really isn't interesting, it's been hard to stay with it.
I wanted/expected to spend more time with the Medusa. I'd like to have gotten to know other characters better. Usually I like Baxter's work, but not so much in this case.
I wanted/expected to spend more time with the Medusa. I'd like to have gotten to know other characters better. Usually I like Baxter's work, but not so much in this case.
June 9, 2017
I enjoyed this! It really does feel a lot like reading Arthur C. Clarke but with a few modernizations, including the presence of a few actual women (granted, most of them don't have particularly major parts, but there is at least one prominent alien gendered as female and she's not even sexy to human males, so that's something).
(See my blog review! http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...)
Clarke is one of my all time favorites, and my favorite of the so-called Big Three ahead of Asimov and Heinlein. Reading Clarke as a teenager, especially 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, is what got me fully hooked on science fiction literature (as opposed to science fiction movies and TV, which I had been enjoying as long as I can remember). In fact, Clarke's mind-expanding Big Ideas also probably helped set me on the path to becoming a philosopher. Thinking about human origins and destinies, the vastness of time and space, and the fathomless mysteries of the universe is what continues to draw me to both science fiction and philosophy. (It also motivates my blog! See: http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com).
Since Clarke took his own journey through the Star Gate in 2008, he's not producing anything new (at least that we know of - maybe he's working as Star Child somewhere).
So what's a Clarke fan filled with nostalgia to do? Here's where Baxter and Reynolds come in! They wrote a novel as as sequel to Clarke's story "A Meeting with Medusa," in which Howard Falcon descends into the atmosphere of Jupiter and discovers life in the form of giant, two-kilometer-wide creatures he calls medusae. The story ends with a tantalizing line that the main character, half-human and half-machine, lived on for centuries. The Medusa Chronicles is that story. (It was also cool to read this soon after the recent real life photos of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/20...).
I don't want to spoil the story, but it involves a few returns to Jupiter as well as trips to Mercury, Saturn, the Oort Cloud, and more. Falcon becomes something like the Forest Gump of the next millennium of the history of the solar system, present at or responsible for almost every major historical event. As the original story hints at, there's a conflict between the humans and machines and Falcon is in a unique place with regard to this history.
I could say more about the human-machine conflict and whether all the hype, coming even from the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, about whether AIs will want to kill us is justified (I say not). But saying much more about that in this review might involve unforgivable spoilers.
So instead I want to talk about nostalgia. What's going on with books like this that try to feed into nostalgia? Does it work? What's the point? Shouldn't I just read Clarke again?
Like I mentioned at the beginning, one great thing about this is that it captures some of the good stuff about Clarke (the Big Ideas) without some of his draw backs (like the fact that women barely exist in most of his work). This is somewhat like a recent all women anthology of Lovecraft-inspired stories, She Walks in Shadows, that tries to take some of Lovecraft's cool ideas without the racism and misogyny.
But maybe we'd be better off creating new stuff. I think this is what much of Baxter's work has done. He's probably one of the more Clarkean SF authors working today. He even collaborated with Clarke on a series of books.
Maybe there's a cash-in element. As in Hollywood, sequels and remakes are all the rage because people like what's familiar, or at least it's easier to market what's familiar. Sure, that explains things like the 2017 Baywatch movie (I mean, who even wanted such an abomination?), but big Clarke fans are probably already reading Baxter and Reynolds or authors like them. It's kind of a niche market.
Is it a way to honor Clarke's memory? A way to continue the story?
Whatever it is, I can say I enjoyed The Medusa Chronicles. It didn't feel exactly like Clarke. But it was in a similar vein. On that count it's way better than those latter day Dune books, which are sort of pulpy, dumbed-down versions of the original sometimes called "McDune" (not that I haven't enjoyed some of them just to spend more time in the Dune universe).
Does nostalgia work? Can you ever re-capture the past? Is it a good idea to do so? Like I've said with regard to nostalgia-fests like the TV show Stranger Things (http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...), you have to use nostalgia responsibly. For one thing, it's never going to reproduce the original. I'll never again feel exactly like I did when I was 14 or 15 and read Clarke for the first time.
The danger of nostalgia is that it can encourage us to rewrite the past to misremember it. (Case in point: making America great again? For who? When?) As much as I love Clarke, when I do read him again I notice that some of his dialogue and exposition is honestly not that great. And his stories mostly take place in some alternative universe where women make up about 2% of the population.
It's complicated to love something but also admit that it has serious problems. And the danger of nostalgia is that it can encourage a willful amnesia in which you love for a thing must be all or nothing (one might say this is a problem of our contemporary political culture as well). But one of the things Clarke taught me (a lesson I'm honestly not sure Baxter and Reynolds have replicated as well as they could have) is that everything is more complicated, more mysterious than you think it is. This is perhaps underscored in The Medusa Chronicles, which is quite literally nostalgia for a future that never was as this takes place in an alternative timeline in which the Apollo missions saved Earth from an asteroid in 1968. Nostalgia can be wonderful in moderation, but it can also flatten the layers of the universe into a single rosy-hued escapism that robs you of your access to the very sorts of Big Ideas that Clarke's imperfect works points to.
(See my blog review! http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...)
Clarke is one of my all time favorites, and my favorite of the so-called Big Three ahead of Asimov and Heinlein. Reading Clarke as a teenager, especially 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, is what got me fully hooked on science fiction literature (as opposed to science fiction movies and TV, which I had been enjoying as long as I can remember). In fact, Clarke's mind-expanding Big Ideas also probably helped set me on the path to becoming a philosopher. Thinking about human origins and destinies, the vastness of time and space, and the fathomless mysteries of the universe is what continues to draw me to both science fiction and philosophy. (It also motivates my blog! See: http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com).
Since Clarke took his own journey through the Star Gate in 2008, he's not producing anything new (at least that we know of - maybe he's working as Star Child somewhere).
So what's a Clarke fan filled with nostalgia to do? Here's where Baxter and Reynolds come in! They wrote a novel as as sequel to Clarke's story "A Meeting with Medusa," in which Howard Falcon descends into the atmosphere of Jupiter and discovers life in the form of giant, two-kilometer-wide creatures he calls medusae. The story ends with a tantalizing line that the main character, half-human and half-machine, lived on for centuries. The Medusa Chronicles is that story. (It was also cool to read this soon after the recent real life photos of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/20...).
I don't want to spoil the story, but it involves a few returns to Jupiter as well as trips to Mercury, Saturn, the Oort Cloud, and more. Falcon becomes something like the Forest Gump of the next millennium of the history of the solar system, present at or responsible for almost every major historical event. As the original story hints at, there's a conflict between the humans and machines and Falcon is in a unique place with regard to this history.
I could say more about the human-machine conflict and whether all the hype, coming even from the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, about whether AIs will want to kill us is justified (I say not). But saying much more about that in this review might involve unforgivable spoilers.
So instead I want to talk about nostalgia. What's going on with books like this that try to feed into nostalgia? Does it work? What's the point? Shouldn't I just read Clarke again?
Like I mentioned at the beginning, one great thing about this is that it captures some of the good stuff about Clarke (the Big Ideas) without some of his draw backs (like the fact that women barely exist in most of his work). This is somewhat like a recent all women anthology of Lovecraft-inspired stories, She Walks in Shadows, that tries to take some of Lovecraft's cool ideas without the racism and misogyny.
But maybe we'd be better off creating new stuff. I think this is what much of Baxter's work has done. He's probably one of the more Clarkean SF authors working today. He even collaborated with Clarke on a series of books.
Maybe there's a cash-in element. As in Hollywood, sequels and remakes are all the rage because people like what's familiar, or at least it's easier to market what's familiar. Sure, that explains things like the 2017 Baywatch movie (I mean, who even wanted such an abomination?), but big Clarke fans are probably already reading Baxter and Reynolds or authors like them. It's kind of a niche market.
Is it a way to honor Clarke's memory? A way to continue the story?
Whatever it is, I can say I enjoyed The Medusa Chronicles. It didn't feel exactly like Clarke. But it was in a similar vein. On that count it's way better than those latter day Dune books, which are sort of pulpy, dumbed-down versions of the original sometimes called "McDune" (not that I haven't enjoyed some of them just to spend more time in the Dune universe).
Does nostalgia work? Can you ever re-capture the past? Is it a good idea to do so? Like I've said with regard to nostalgia-fests like the TV show Stranger Things (http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...), you have to use nostalgia responsibly. For one thing, it's never going to reproduce the original. I'll never again feel exactly like I did when I was 14 or 15 and read Clarke for the first time.
The danger of nostalgia is that it can encourage us to rewrite the past to misremember it. (Case in point: making America great again? For who? When?) As much as I love Clarke, when I do read him again I notice that some of his dialogue and exposition is honestly not that great. And his stories mostly take place in some alternative universe where women make up about 2% of the population.
It's complicated to love something but also admit that it has serious problems. And the danger of nostalgia is that it can encourage a willful amnesia in which you love for a thing must be all or nothing (one might say this is a problem of our contemporary political culture as well). But one of the things Clarke taught me (a lesson I'm honestly not sure Baxter and Reynolds have replicated as well as they could have) is that everything is more complicated, more mysterious than you think it is. This is perhaps underscored in The Medusa Chronicles, which is quite literally nostalgia for a future that never was as this takes place in an alternative timeline in which the Apollo missions saved Earth from an asteroid in 1968. Nostalgia can be wonderful in moderation, but it can also flatten the layers of the universe into a single rosy-hued escapism that robs you of your access to the very sorts of Big Ideas that Clarke's imperfect works points to.
September 17, 2017
Review: THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES by Stephen Baxter and Alistair Reynolds
Certain special authors inspire and fulfill my love of hard science fiction and of science, including Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, Peter F. Hamilton, and the late master Arthur C. Clarke. Each of these make science fiction and its science sing.
THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES is a sequel to Clarke's novella "A Meeting with Medusa." I so admired Clarke's protagonist Howard Falcon, and his starring role in THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES has intensified my total admiration. Baxter and Reynolds weave a solar-system wide tapestry worthy of Clarke's original vision, wrapping hard science in imaginative ethics and philosophical considerations--on the grand scale.
Certain special authors inspire and fulfill my love of hard science fiction and of science, including Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, Peter F. Hamilton, and the late master Arthur C. Clarke. Each of these make science fiction and its science sing.
THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES is a sequel to Clarke's novella "A Meeting with Medusa." I so admired Clarke's protagonist Howard Falcon, and his starring role in THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES has intensified my total admiration. Baxter and Reynolds weave a solar-system wide tapestry worthy of Clarke's original vision, wrapping hard science in imaginative ethics and philosophical considerations--on the grand scale.
May 23, 2016
This book was sent to me by the publisher at no cost.
So. This book. When I heard that Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter were collaborating, I was beside myself. This is two of my great SF loves coming together. It's Robert Plant and Jim Morrison jamming.
At the back of my mind was the reminder that I haven't quite adored Baxter's latest novels, and that Reynolds' latest novels have been quite different from his early ones too. NONETHELESS. Plant and Morrison, folks.
I really liked this... but I didn't love it. It feels... old fashioned.
The premise: building on Arthur C Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa," Baxter and Reynolds take the main character, Howard Falcon, who is a cyborg due to a serious crash years before, and extend him way into the future. This is a future where humanity is incredibly suspicious of machines and artificial intelligence, and Falcon - being the incredibly weird hybrid that he is - is often at the receiving end of that suspicion. But it also means that he's useful as a mediator when humanity's machines start developing consciousness, which means he's there at the birth of that intelligence, which means he continues to be useful as an intermediary. This becomes the story of Falcon's life, and thus the story of The Medusa Chronicles.
I did like it because I like thinking about humanity in the solar system and how that might work (although this is another one where there's looming interplanetary conflict, so apparently that's unavoidable). I liked the whimsical attachment to the notion of ballooning as inspiration for astronauts and Jovian exploration. And I also like stories of the development of artificial intelligence and the consequences of that for humanity, although I did feel like that wasn't explored enough here.
The novel feels a bit old-fashioned because I can't quite fathom humanity being suspicious of machines. I assume this reflects the novels and other media I've been consuming - I mean yes, be suspicious, but surely only after they've shown that they want to kill us and use our bodies as compost? There's also a significant level of info-dumping, which isn't always a problem for me but can be a barrier, I know, for others. And, too, there's a lack of significant character development. The reader gets to know Falcon almost by default, as our point of view, but most of the others - like Hope Dhoni, Falcon's medical expert for much of his incredibly prolonged life - are almost faceless, ciphers.
There are some lovely moments and a few odd moments in the novel. The odd moments are especially where Falcon makes reference to old literature or films and wonders if anyone will get the reference - for example, to Tolkien - and yet Project Silenus is thus named because of Euripides, and in explaining the naming he doesn’t have to explain who Euripides is. I'm unconvinced about the longevity of Euripides over Tolkien (we're talking centuries here), although I guess Euripides does have form. Some of the lovely moments are in the alternate history of NASA and thus humanity in space that Baxter and Reynolds present. Here, the threat of an asteroid completely changes the direction of the Apollo programme and has consequences for humanity going to Mars and beyond; the authors reference real astronauts, like Frank Borman and Charlie Duke, but give them a slightly different career path (and there's no reference to 'any similarity to real people is purely coincidental' or however the line runs, in the fine print).
Overall this is a pretty good science fiction novel, but it's not one of my favourites for the year.
So. This book. When I heard that Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter were collaborating, I was beside myself. This is two of my great SF loves coming together. It's Robert Plant and Jim Morrison jamming.
At the back of my mind was the reminder that I haven't quite adored Baxter's latest novels, and that Reynolds' latest novels have been quite different from his early ones too. NONETHELESS. Plant and Morrison, folks.
I really liked this... but I didn't love it. It feels... old fashioned.
The premise: building on Arthur C Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa," Baxter and Reynolds take the main character, Howard Falcon, who is a cyborg due to a serious crash years before, and extend him way into the future. This is a future where humanity is incredibly suspicious of machines and artificial intelligence, and Falcon - being the incredibly weird hybrid that he is - is often at the receiving end of that suspicion. But it also means that he's useful as a mediator when humanity's machines start developing consciousness, which means he's there at the birth of that intelligence, which means he continues to be useful as an intermediary. This becomes the story of Falcon's life, and thus the story of The Medusa Chronicles.
I did like it because I like thinking about humanity in the solar system and how that might work (although this is another one where there's looming interplanetary conflict, so apparently that's unavoidable). I liked the whimsical attachment to the notion of ballooning as inspiration for astronauts and Jovian exploration. And I also like stories of the development of artificial intelligence and the consequences of that for humanity, although I did feel like that wasn't explored enough here.
The novel feels a bit old-fashioned because I can't quite fathom humanity being suspicious of machines. I assume this reflects the novels and other media I've been consuming - I mean yes, be suspicious, but surely only after they've shown that they want to kill us and use our bodies as compost? There's also a significant level of info-dumping, which isn't always a problem for me but can be a barrier, I know, for others. And, too, there's a lack of significant character development. The reader gets to know Falcon almost by default, as our point of view, but most of the others - like Hope Dhoni, Falcon's medical expert for much of his incredibly prolonged life - are almost faceless, ciphers.
There are some lovely moments and a few odd moments in the novel. The odd moments are especially where Falcon makes reference to old literature or films and wonders if anyone will get the reference - for example, to Tolkien - and yet Project Silenus is thus named because of Euripides, and in explaining the naming he doesn’t have to explain who Euripides is. I'm unconvinced about the longevity of Euripides over Tolkien (we're talking centuries here), although I guess Euripides does have form. Some of the lovely moments are in the alternate history of NASA and thus humanity in space that Baxter and Reynolds present. Here, the threat of an asteroid completely changes the direction of the Apollo programme and has consequences for humanity going to Mars and beyond; the authors reference real astronauts, like Frank Borman and Charlie Duke, but give them a slightly different career path (and there's no reference to 'any similarity to real people is purely coincidental' or however the line runs, in the fine print).
Overall this is a pretty good science fiction novel, but it's not one of my favourites for the year.
August 23, 2016
(...)
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
March 9, 2022
The Medusa Chronicles contains nuggets of brilliance immersed in a sea of mediocrity. Perhaps because it is essentially professional fanfic to a novella by Arthur C. Clarke it often feels old fashioned. For many people this will be a plus, especially for fans of retro scifi. For me, not so much. A bigger issue is the pacing, which is just all the way off in this book. Massive timeskips occur suddenly and jarringly, interspersed with weirdly lengthy ruminations on the protagonist's inner state of being. It causes the book to feel weirdly distant to the plot it is describing. That said, in its better parts the book does an excellent job of exploring the limits of identity, bodily integrity, consciousness, and the passage of time. These episodes are very compelling, but too few and far between to decisively lift the book out of mediocrity.
June 23, 2016
I like that it reads like a fix-up novel and the fact that it feels like something Clarke would write in 2016. And Peter Kenny as the narrator was perfection as always. But the idea of a being something in between a human and a machine was not explored. Howard Falcon could have been a human being without any impact on the story.
started_finish_later
May 25, 2016it is not that long a time when almost anything by the 2 authors was a must for me and like with the newer Polity novels, another "tried but not for me" book
September 8, 2016
Crap.
Alternates between cartoon and verbal diarrhoea.
One good moment at the end of the flinger story, must have been written by Reynolds.
Alternates between cartoon and verbal diarrhoea.
One good moment at the end of the flinger story, must have been written by Reynolds.
August 1, 2016
Too many things in my brain right now. I pity anyone who reads this. I don’t know where this review is going but I can about guarantee that it’s ride to nowhere.
I have been sitting on this short story collection from Arthur C Clarke for quite a while now. It’s called The Sentinel, which is the title of his novella which inspired 2001. A movie in which he was so inspired that he wrote the novel (technically, he wrote the novelization along with the production of the film, so it’s not like he watched the movie and then wrote a fan-fic piece about it, although that would be funny). Then, when he starting writing sequels to 2001, he changed the details to more closely match the movie (like, for example, 2001 the novel is actually set near Saturn, not Jupiter, so in 2010 he just said, ‘Whatever, pretend the events of the last book all happened near Jupiter instead of Saturn”). So weird.
Anyway, when I found out my two main men, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, had collaborated on a novel, after my head exploded (Stephen Baxter was THE reason I started reading Science Fiction when I discovered his novel Ring back in the very early 90’s (Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep is also part of this conversation of my origins as a literary SF fan and wannabe writer, but it was secondary to Baxter’s work, which was really my gateway). I talk about it in about 1 out of every 3 or 4 reviews I do (Ironic, I’ve never reviewed that book, despite reading it about 5 times over the decades). It was, no joke, Baxter’s aforementioned novel that introduced me to relativity, it lead me down a rabbit hole of discovery on physics that I’m still in the midst of 20 plus years later. I still remember, quite fondly, arguing with a friend of mine about special relativity and how it might work in some situations. He was befuddled that relativity existed at all, as was I, at first. And we spent endless hours nerding out over it. It’s sad to me that it was so late in my life that I was exposed to it at all. Public education in the rural south in the 80's wasn't that great.
Such good times. Anyway, it was, in a lot of ways, the book that introduced me to adulthood and started shaping me into the person I am now, for better or for worse. In the late 90’s Baxter started getting more fascinated by some topics that were more esoteric. He started branching out of space based SF and into more abstract things, like a trilogy about sentient Mastodons as protagonists or a novel with Evolution itself as an antagonist, I seem to recall one novel where the big idea was humans evolving into hive minds or whatever, not in the cool way that Arthur C Clarke did in Childhood’s End but in a lame, smelly, way where we burrowed underground and lost a lot of what made us human in the first place. It was creepy. With Baxter exploring these things I started looking around for someone to fill that niche in my life around the time that Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels started coming out. Before long it was him that I couldn’t get enough of. For a period of about 20 years I probably counted one of those two as my favorite author.
And now they've joined forces. Boom.
So, that collection of short stories from Clarke had a story in it called A Meeting with Medusa. This new novel is a sequel to that story. Glad I had that short story collection I mentioned earlier lying around.
Clarke’s story, written in 1971, I think, is about an explorer riding in the clouds of Jupiter in a dirigible and struggling to stay alive as he discovers that a whole ecosystem is in place. It’s a cool story. It won a lot of awards, but this theme has been carried on by so many people (I read a writer’s of the future winner a few years ago that told an eerily similar story) that it feels very uninspired as of now.
That isn’t Clarke’s fault, except that he’s been influential enough to make his work seem derivative in retrospect. That’s what happens when you’re such a giant in the field.*
Anyway, this is a rare book for me in that I personally can see a lot of ‘flaws’ in it and still think it is a masterpiece. I remind myself of the movie reviewer for my local paper that once said in a rare interview that she would never give a Star Trek movie less than 4 stars. She just couldn’t figure out a way to not enjoy watching them, even if she knew they weren’t very good by other, more conventional metrics.
So this is me saying I have a blind spot for this kind of story. Now, I do think it’s good, regardless. It’s not like I’m saying this sucks but I forgive myself for liking it because it reminds me of being a kid again, or something. No, I’m just saying that I think this was a fantastic novel, and at the same time I can see why other people might struggle with it.
It covers a lot of ground, for one. It moves from around the year 2100 to sometime close to 2900 (I actually finished this novel a few weeks ago, I can’t remember the exact dates here) and therefore each of the novels six sections covers a pretty large chunk of time. There is a central protagonist throughout, but he’s aloof and cold and not given to much emotion. This is a story of ideas, and these are two of the biggest ‘ideas’ guys around.
Anyway, I was about to wrap this thing up and all that, but I realized I didn’t actually say a word about what this is about… turns out, at the end of the Clarke short story it’s revealed that this person that flew that dirigible in the clouds of Jupiter wasn’t entirely human. He’s almost died in a horrible accident on earth years earlier. What was left of him was put in a mechanical body. It made him unique and feared. It also, the short story mentioned, a much needed mediator between the troubling times between humans and computers in the centuries ahead.
So, yeah, it’s about an AI that becomes more than its human creators intended, and how quickly it became more than humans could comprehend, let alone control.
It’s also about this guy with a metal body, and how he isn’t sure he belongs more to the humans, or the machines. It’s good stuff with some heady SF trippiness later in the book. I love it and could read a thousand other novels just like this one.
*A digression that goes beyond simple parentheticals here: Clarke was an author I discovered just as I was leaving the “B’s” of SF and started working my way through the “C’s.” I read, specifically, Rendezvous with Rama and loved it (I’ve since read it two other times, and even managed to read the less inspired sequels twice).
After seeing the SyFy mini-series of Childhood’s End late in 2015 I couldn’t help but wish it had been the Rama novel that had been adapted instead. It makes for much more of a sensible SF show in my mind. I think that Morgan Freeman has had the rights to the Rama books tied to his production company for decades now. I suppose I should be happy that anyone was making a television production out of Clarke’s works. It’s just that I didn’t particularly think that story was as compelling today as it was when it was newly told, again, it’s like the whole derivative thing we talked about earlier. It’s too clichéd now – it is around 65 years old. Wait... older that that, the short story collection I mentioned earlier has the original short story in it, written years before it was expanded into a novel, and I think it's from around WWII.
I have been sitting on this short story collection from Arthur C Clarke for quite a while now. It’s called The Sentinel, which is the title of his novella which inspired 2001. A movie in which he was so inspired that he wrote the novel (technically, he wrote the novelization along with the production of the film, so it’s not like he watched the movie and then wrote a fan-fic piece about it, although that would be funny). Then, when he starting writing sequels to 2001, he changed the details to more closely match the movie (like, for example, 2001 the novel is actually set near Saturn, not Jupiter, so in 2010 he just said, ‘Whatever, pretend the events of the last book all happened near Jupiter instead of Saturn”). So weird.
Anyway, when I found out my two main men, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, had collaborated on a novel, after my head exploded (Stephen Baxter was THE reason I started reading Science Fiction when I discovered his novel Ring back in the very early 90’s (Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep is also part of this conversation of my origins as a literary SF fan and wannabe writer, but it was secondary to Baxter’s work, which was really my gateway). I talk about it in about 1 out of every 3 or 4 reviews I do (Ironic, I’ve never reviewed that book, despite reading it about 5 times over the decades). It was, no joke, Baxter’s aforementioned novel that introduced me to relativity, it lead me down a rabbit hole of discovery on physics that I’m still in the midst of 20 plus years later. I still remember, quite fondly, arguing with a friend of mine about special relativity and how it might work in some situations. He was befuddled that relativity existed at all, as was I, at first. And we spent endless hours nerding out over it. It’s sad to me that it was so late in my life that I was exposed to it at all. Public education in the rural south in the 80's wasn't that great.
Such good times. Anyway, it was, in a lot of ways, the book that introduced me to adulthood and started shaping me into the person I am now, for better or for worse. In the late 90’s Baxter started getting more fascinated by some topics that were more esoteric. He started branching out of space based SF and into more abstract things, like a trilogy about sentient Mastodons as protagonists or a novel with Evolution itself as an antagonist, I seem to recall one novel where the big idea was humans evolving into hive minds or whatever, not in the cool way that Arthur C Clarke did in Childhood’s End but in a lame, smelly, way where we burrowed underground and lost a lot of what made us human in the first place. It was creepy. With Baxter exploring these things I started looking around for someone to fill that niche in my life around the time that Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels started coming out. Before long it was him that I couldn’t get enough of. For a period of about 20 years I probably counted one of those two as my favorite author.
And now they've joined forces. Boom.
So, that collection of short stories from Clarke had a story in it called A Meeting with Medusa. This new novel is a sequel to that story. Glad I had that short story collection I mentioned earlier lying around.
Clarke’s story, written in 1971, I think, is about an explorer riding in the clouds of Jupiter in a dirigible and struggling to stay alive as he discovers that a whole ecosystem is in place. It’s a cool story. It won a lot of awards, but this theme has been carried on by so many people (I read a writer’s of the future winner a few years ago that told an eerily similar story) that it feels very uninspired as of now.
That isn’t Clarke’s fault, except that he’s been influential enough to make his work seem derivative in retrospect. That’s what happens when you’re such a giant in the field.*
Anyway, this is a rare book for me in that I personally can see a lot of ‘flaws’ in it and still think it is a masterpiece. I remind myself of the movie reviewer for my local paper that once said in a rare interview that she would never give a Star Trek movie less than 4 stars. She just couldn’t figure out a way to not enjoy watching them, even if she knew they weren’t very good by other, more conventional metrics.
So this is me saying I have a blind spot for this kind of story. Now, I do think it’s good, regardless. It’s not like I’m saying this sucks but I forgive myself for liking it because it reminds me of being a kid again, or something. No, I’m just saying that I think this was a fantastic novel, and at the same time I can see why other people might struggle with it.
It covers a lot of ground, for one. It moves from around the year 2100 to sometime close to 2900 (I actually finished this novel a few weeks ago, I can’t remember the exact dates here) and therefore each of the novels six sections covers a pretty large chunk of time. There is a central protagonist throughout, but he’s aloof and cold and not given to much emotion. This is a story of ideas, and these are two of the biggest ‘ideas’ guys around.
Anyway, I was about to wrap this thing up and all that, but I realized I didn’t actually say a word about what this is about… turns out, at the end of the Clarke short story it’s revealed that this person that flew that dirigible in the clouds of Jupiter wasn’t entirely human. He’s almost died in a horrible accident on earth years earlier. What was left of him was put in a mechanical body. It made him unique and feared. It also, the short story mentioned, a much needed mediator between the troubling times between humans and computers in the centuries ahead.
So, yeah, it’s about an AI that becomes more than its human creators intended, and how quickly it became more than humans could comprehend, let alone control.
It’s also about this guy with a metal body, and how he isn’t sure he belongs more to the humans, or the machines. It’s good stuff with some heady SF trippiness later in the book. I love it and could read a thousand other novels just like this one.
*A digression that goes beyond simple parentheticals here: Clarke was an author I discovered just as I was leaving the “B’s” of SF and started working my way through the “C’s.” I read, specifically, Rendezvous with Rama and loved it (I’ve since read it two other times, and even managed to read the less inspired sequels twice).
After seeing the SyFy mini-series of Childhood’s End late in 2015 I couldn’t help but wish it had been the Rama novel that had been adapted instead. It makes for much more of a sensible SF show in my mind. I think that Morgan Freeman has had the rights to the Rama books tied to his production company for decades now. I suppose I should be happy that anyone was making a television production out of Clarke’s works. It’s just that I didn’t particularly think that story was as compelling today as it was when it was newly told, again, it’s like the whole derivative thing we talked about earlier. It’s too clichéd now – it is around 65 years old. Wait... older that that, the short story collection I mentioned earlier has the original short story in it, written years before it was expanded into a novel, and I think it's from around WWII.
October 8, 2019
This was quite a treat, it is a sequel Arthur C. Clarke's "A meeting with Medusa", written by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds. Though I am less less familiar with the former, I can attest that the continuation was definitely in the spirit of the first while still revealing the penprints of new authors. In particular the latter as some of the elements toward the end were hitting the same spot.
The story spans over centuries as mankind spread out into space and encounter potential new sentient societies, either from other enhances primates or artificial entities that emerge. Obviously some clashes occur and the books handle it in a quite warm and encompassing view.
As for similarities it reminded me of The expanse, War games and some more nostalgic works which kept my interest throughout.
The story spans over centuries as mankind spread out into space and encounter potential new sentient societies, either from other enhances primates or artificial entities that emerge. Obviously some clashes occur and the books handle it in a quite warm and encompassing view.
As for similarities it reminded me of The expanse, War games and some more nostalgic works which kept my interest throughout.
August 2, 2024
Overall this story is interesting and engaging and in one aspect, the runaway reaction of the development of artificial intelligence and the existential threat it poses to humanity, feels current.
I did find the pages densely packed, which made for quite slow reading, when I prefer to make quick progress through the pages of the novels I read. I also found the way the story gave a little bit before moving on, in some cases centuries, left me occasionally a bit empty. Maybe the very fact that the story spans centuries is why it reads slowly? Maybe there is stylistic intent there?
The last hundred pages or so were, for me, the most fascinating and, hence, fast-moving as the story reached its climax. This elevated the book from three to four stars.
I did find the pages densely packed, which made for quite slow reading, when I prefer to make quick progress through the pages of the novels I read. I also found the way the story gave a little bit before moving on, in some cases centuries, left me occasionally a bit empty. Maybe the very fact that the story spans centuries is why it reads slowly? Maybe there is stylistic intent there?
The last hundred pages or so were, for me, the most fascinating and, hence, fast-moving as the story reached its climax. This elevated the book from three to four stars.
May 10, 2021
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.
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