J-Sun
⚡
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2008
- Messages
- 5,324
There are a lot of posts that mention Robert Reed but no thread on him I could find so, since I just read a Reed book I liked, I figured I'd start one, despite my weird Reed reading history. I'll blather about it but I am mainly curious what others have read of this author and what they think.
Stories, Two/Three Novels, Collection
I don't remember what stories I read in the 90s but I disliked some and liked others enough that they made me interested in the author. In 1999, I read The Leeshore and Down the Bright Way back-to-back and didn't like either of them, to my surprise, though it seems like Down was probably the better of the two. Given that I didn't like the novels but did like the stories, I tried The Dragons of Springplace in 2000 and, while it's gone vague on me, I did very much enjoy the collection overall. That was it for a long time except that one of the stories I'd read in the 90s was "Marrow" and sometime later, I started reading the novel of the same name. I was enjoying it okay but got distracted by something and somehow never finished it, though I intend to start over and finish it someday.
Sister Alice
Another story I'd read in the 90s was "Baby's Fire" which was part of his Sister Alice series and as soon as I found out about the Sister Alice book, I wanted to get it. I finally did awhile ago and finished reading it yesterday. It's billed as a novel but it's really a fixup of five novellas. The only sign of this is that Reed's acknowledgements do give "special thanks to Gardner Dozois for publishing the original novellas". At the time, I hadn't yet gotten as sick of the far future post-human tropes as I have since and "Baby's Fire" was really impressive to me. In reading this, I just reset to that attitude. This is really interestingly done, stylistically. There's nothing obfuscatory or literarily "precious" about it. It's not exactly written as a fantasy but I imagine a lot of fantasy readers could really enjoy it, as it sprinkles in actually plausible scientific detail amidst outrageous speculation and almost mainstream narrations of, for instance, "children" having "snowball fights" so that it all blends together and doesn't have the "So, Professor, how does the super-duper thruster-buster work? - Well, Bob..." feel. And such "mushy" SF often turns me off, personally, but it works for me here and I think it might for many SF fans. My only real complaint with it is that it throws around "thousands" and "millions" of years in fairly meaningless ways and, while the stories span huge timeframes and the tech is described as having changed compared to the early few millennia, it doesn't really change at all in the last many millennia.
That aside, this is a sort of "bildungsroman of a god" story when Sister Alice (cloned from Ian Chamberlain) and a bunch of her pals accidentally destroy a chunk of the Milky Way (when the story opens - and it gets worse) when they create another universe at the galactic core and leave the door between the universes open a little too long. So Ord, another clone of the Chamberlains who's a mere baby of a century or so at the start, is given a mission by a penitent Alice to make things right. His friendships and hatreds with Ravleen (a Sanchex clone) and Xo (a Nuyen clone) form a major part of what ensues. These Chamberlains and Sanchexes and Nuyens are part of the "1000 Families" which are kind of like a thousand sets of Olympian deities who govern the Milky Way in the New Galactic Order after the chaos of the posthuman thing. And now this Peace is coming unglued due to people not being happy about the Milky Way incinerating and due to power struggles between the Families.
Despite "Baby's Fire" getting me into it, "Brother Perfect" turned out to be my favorite, probably. The first ("Sister Alice") and (although I don't care for the nature of it as a type of SF and a way to end the book) the last ("Father to the Man") are both on the next tier as quite good. I wasn't thrilled with the middle one ("Mother Death") and it does signal a shift from the more beautifully written and calmer first couple of stories to the more action-packed chase/combat-type final stories, but it's still got its points, too.
Bibliographical note: A cursory glance at my old Asimov's issue with "Baby's Fire" shows that, in the book, he naturally changed a couple of elliptical words into something clearer and dumped a chunk of background information from the story version because we're guaranteed to have that information in the book form. And there was an excellent small addition (Sister Alice has one small paragraph of a thought near the end that turns into two small paragraphs of a couple of thoughts) that must have occurred to him between the story and book. So that all makes sense. But there's also a lot added/deleted/changed words here and there that I can't say are really necessary or improve anything. But the basic essence of the story is unchanged from story to book. I don't know if the other stories are handled the same or not but they likely are.
Misc
Anyway, I've yet to comes across a pure novel of Reed's I like, but I like a lot of his stories and Sister Alice serves perfectly well as a novel or a collection. The connected collection of stories is actually my favorite thing when done well such that the stories form a larger story and, beyond just that, form a whole greater than the sum of the parts, and this does that.
Speaking of his works generally, Reed sometimes has a strange dourness and an excessive fascination with body parts and excreta but, more significantly, he's an interesting writer in that he can write large or small scale stories of high or low tech but he seems to have a particular interest in gigantic-scale wildly speculative stuff yet takes a small scale, human, non-tech-y approach to it.
But, as I say, this is based on a smallish sample of four-and-a-fraction books, mostly many years ago and I'm curious about other folks' experiences.
Stories, Two/Three Novels, Collection
I don't remember what stories I read in the 90s but I disliked some and liked others enough that they made me interested in the author. In 1999, I read The Leeshore and Down the Bright Way back-to-back and didn't like either of them, to my surprise, though it seems like Down was probably the better of the two. Given that I didn't like the novels but did like the stories, I tried The Dragons of Springplace in 2000 and, while it's gone vague on me, I did very much enjoy the collection overall. That was it for a long time except that one of the stories I'd read in the 90s was "Marrow" and sometime later, I started reading the novel of the same name. I was enjoying it okay but got distracted by something and somehow never finished it, though I intend to start over and finish it someday.
Sister Alice
Another story I'd read in the 90s was "Baby's Fire" which was part of his Sister Alice series and as soon as I found out about the Sister Alice book, I wanted to get it. I finally did awhile ago and finished reading it yesterday. It's billed as a novel but it's really a fixup of five novellas. The only sign of this is that Reed's acknowledgements do give "special thanks to Gardner Dozois for publishing the original novellas". At the time, I hadn't yet gotten as sick of the far future post-human tropes as I have since and "Baby's Fire" was really impressive to me. In reading this, I just reset to that attitude. This is really interestingly done, stylistically. There's nothing obfuscatory or literarily "precious" about it. It's not exactly written as a fantasy but I imagine a lot of fantasy readers could really enjoy it, as it sprinkles in actually plausible scientific detail amidst outrageous speculation and almost mainstream narrations of, for instance, "children" having "snowball fights" so that it all blends together and doesn't have the "So, Professor, how does the super-duper thruster-buster work? - Well, Bob..." feel. And such "mushy" SF often turns me off, personally, but it works for me here and I think it might for many SF fans. My only real complaint with it is that it throws around "thousands" and "millions" of years in fairly meaningless ways and, while the stories span huge timeframes and the tech is described as having changed compared to the early few millennia, it doesn't really change at all in the last many millennia.
That aside, this is a sort of "bildungsroman of a god" story when Sister Alice (cloned from Ian Chamberlain) and a bunch of her pals accidentally destroy a chunk of the Milky Way (when the story opens - and it gets worse) when they create another universe at the galactic core and leave the door between the universes open a little too long. So Ord, another clone of the Chamberlains who's a mere baby of a century or so at the start, is given a mission by a penitent Alice to make things right. His friendships and hatreds with Ravleen (a Sanchex clone) and Xo (a Nuyen clone) form a major part of what ensues. These Chamberlains and Sanchexes and Nuyens are part of the "1000 Families" which are kind of like a thousand sets of Olympian deities who govern the Milky Way in the New Galactic Order after the chaos of the posthuman thing. And now this Peace is coming unglued due to people not being happy about the Milky Way incinerating and due to power struggles between the Families.
Despite "Baby's Fire" getting me into it, "Brother Perfect" turned out to be my favorite, probably. The first ("Sister Alice") and (although I don't care for the nature of it as a type of SF and a way to end the book) the last ("Father to the Man") are both on the next tier as quite good. I wasn't thrilled with the middle one ("Mother Death") and it does signal a shift from the more beautifully written and calmer first couple of stories to the more action-packed chase/combat-type final stories, but it's still got its points, too.
Bibliographical note: A cursory glance at my old Asimov's issue with "Baby's Fire" shows that, in the book, he naturally changed a couple of elliptical words into something clearer and dumped a chunk of background information from the story version because we're guaranteed to have that information in the book form. And there was an excellent small addition (Sister Alice has one small paragraph of a thought near the end that turns into two small paragraphs of a couple of thoughts) that must have occurred to him between the story and book. So that all makes sense. But there's also a lot added/deleted/changed words here and there that I can't say are really necessary or improve anything. But the basic essence of the story is unchanged from story to book. I don't know if the other stories are handled the same or not but they likely are.
Misc
Anyway, I've yet to comes across a pure novel of Reed's I like, but I like a lot of his stories and Sister Alice serves perfectly well as a novel or a collection. The connected collection of stories is actually my favorite thing when done well such that the stories form a larger story and, beyond just that, form a whole greater than the sum of the parts, and this does that.
Speaking of his works generally, Reed sometimes has a strange dourness and an excessive fascination with body parts and excreta but, more significantly, he's an interesting writer in that he can write large or small scale stories of high or low tech but he seems to have a particular interest in gigantic-scale wildly speculative stuff yet takes a small scale, human, non-tech-y approach to it.
But, as I say, this is based on a smallish sample of four-and-a-fraction books, mostly many years ago and I'm curious about other folks' experiences.
