RogerBW's Blog

1994 science fiction, sequel to The Ring of Charon. This review contains spoilers for that first book.

With Earth kidnapped into another star system and cut off from space travel, while the remainder of humanity is concentrated on the Moon and gradually running out of technology, the really important thing is: what was the third party, which the creatures that did this were so scared of?

This is very much of a piece with the first book: huge cosmic ideas, and thoroughly flat characters exploring them. The space hippies seem a bit more interesting this time round (they're still Wrong but some of them are now allowed to be competent), and the major new character is a nineteen-year-old girl who can see all the answers where the world's best scientists can't come up with anything.

Still, there's a slight improvement on last time: rather than everything being worked out from unsupported speculation, the big infodump is conveyed by mechanical telepathy, so at least it has a plausible source. It's still an infodump, though.

As before, the technology is basically magic, with sense of wonder oddly uncorrelated with how impressive things seem: something which seemed like a very obvious application of the established tech to me (putting a virtual mass in front of a spacecraft so that it "falls" towards it at high acceleration, and moving it away as the spacecraft gets closer, thus giving you a reactionless space drive) is treated here as an astounding invention, while the idea that these ancient aliens have never found the concept of a replay attack worth defending against is simply passed on without comment.

I found this book less impressive than the first, but that may be inevitable: it can't introduce as many amazing concepts as before, and resolving things is always harder to make interesting than building up tension in the first place. The action of this book is about 80% theorising and 20% derring-do, which is fine, but they aren't particularly mixed together.

A third volume, possibly to be called The Falling World, was planned, but has not been published. While this book doesn't finish everyone's stories, it does still feel to me like a satisfactory ending to the overall narrative.