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Mar. 30th, 2010
Review Station
Mar. 30th, 2010 11:23 amHey,
So last night I finished up Mercury Station by Mark von Schlegell. This is the second in the "System Series", a set of literary sci-fi. I read the first book Venusia and thought it was interesting enough that I'd give the second book a try.
The first book spent a lot of time dealing with reality as shared consensus. This book delves into the nature of time. In the far future, Eddie Ryan, a secret solider for Irish revolutionaries (fighting for a country that no longer exists on a planet no longer inhabitable), gets caught trying to blow up a monument and is sent to a juvenile detention facility on Mercury. He's still a prisoner there 20 years later thanks to pan-solar collapse. Only now he wakes up in a medical facility having lost his arm with no memory of the past week. The local AIs inform him that they too have lost a week's worth of memories and that the station appears to have been abandoned by everyone except him. The AIs require him to retrieve his memories because unless the AIs can establish a definitive time-line of what happened, the station will catastrophically shut down.
Eddie also awakens to find a book in his possession, an ancient medieval manuscript that talks about the wanderings of a mysterious being through Prussia. We jump narratives between Eddie and this person and through the two of them we slowly reconstruct some of what happened during the missing week.
This book. like it's predecessor, is less about a straight-forward plot and more about impressions and moments. Given that it's tackling time and time-travel, the whole thing is a bit more disconnected than the previous volume. There's the usual looping and snaking time-line plots that recursively bring things together. Overall, it was a bit harder to follow than Venusia and I think the "past" story was developed more at the expense of the "present" story. It was an interesting and challenging read though. Plus, there was a fairly detailed mention of Napoleonic Wargamming and astronomy/astrology and Medieval super-tech so consider my neurons appropriately tickled.
later
Tom
So last night I finished up Mercury Station by Mark von Schlegell. This is the second in the "System Series", a set of literary sci-fi. I read the first book Venusia and thought it was interesting enough that I'd give the second book a try.
The first book spent a lot of time dealing with reality as shared consensus. This book delves into the nature of time. In the far future, Eddie Ryan, a secret solider for Irish revolutionaries (fighting for a country that no longer exists on a planet no longer inhabitable), gets caught trying to blow up a monument and is sent to a juvenile detention facility on Mercury. He's still a prisoner there 20 years later thanks to pan-solar collapse. Only now he wakes up in a medical facility having lost his arm with no memory of the past week. The local AIs inform him that they too have lost a week's worth of memories and that the station appears to have been abandoned by everyone except him. The AIs require him to retrieve his memories because unless the AIs can establish a definitive time-line of what happened, the station will catastrophically shut down.
Eddie also awakens to find a book in his possession, an ancient medieval manuscript that talks about the wanderings of a mysterious being through Prussia. We jump narratives between Eddie and this person and through the two of them we slowly reconstruct some of what happened during the missing week.
This book. like it's predecessor, is less about a straight-forward plot and more about impressions and moments. Given that it's tackling time and time-travel, the whole thing is a bit more disconnected than the previous volume. There's the usual looping and snaking time-line plots that recursively bring things together. Overall, it was a bit harder to follow than Venusia and I think the "past" story was developed more at the expense of the "present" story. It was an interesting and challenging read though. Plus, there was a fairly detailed mention of Napoleonic Wargamming and astronomy/astrology and Medieval super-tech so consider my neurons appropriately tickled.
later
Tom
Review Station
Mar. 30th, 2010 11:23 amHey,
So last night I finished up Mercury Station by Mark von Schlegell. This is the second in the "System Series", a set of literary sci-fi. I read the first book Venusia and thought it was interesting enough that I'd give the second book a try.
The first book spent a lot of time dealing with reality as shared consensus. This book delves into the nature of time. In the far future, Eddie Ryan, a secret solider for Irish revolutionaries (fighting for a country that no longer exists on a planet no longer inhabitable), gets caught trying to blow up a monument and is sent to a juvenile detention facility on Mercury. He's still a prisoner there 20 years later thanks to pan-solar collapse. Only now he wakes up in a medical facility having lost his arm with no memory of the past week. The local AIs inform him that they too have lost a week's worth of memories and that the station appears to have been abandoned by everyone except him. The AIs require him to retrieve his memories because unless the AIs can establish a definitive time-line of what happened, the station will catastrophically shut down.
Eddie also awakens to find a book in his possession, an ancient medieval manuscript that talks about the wanderings of a mysterious being through Prussia. We jump narratives between Eddie and this person and through the two of them we slowly reconstruct some of what happened during the missing week.
This book. like it's predecessor, is less about a straight-forward plot and more about impressions and moments. Given that it's tackling time and time-travel, the whole thing is a bit more disconnected than the previous volume. There's the usual looping and snaking time-line plots that recursively bring things together. Overall, it was a bit harder to follow than Venusia and I think the "past" story was developed more at the expense of the "present" story. It was an interesting and challenging read though. Plus, there was a fairly detailed mention of Napoleonic Wargamming and astronomy/astrology and Medieval super-tech so consider my neurons appropriately tickled.
later
Tom
So last night I finished up Mercury Station by Mark von Schlegell. This is the second in the "System Series", a set of literary sci-fi. I read the first book Venusia and thought it was interesting enough that I'd give the second book a try.
The first book spent a lot of time dealing with reality as shared consensus. This book delves into the nature of time. In the far future, Eddie Ryan, a secret solider for Irish revolutionaries (fighting for a country that no longer exists on a planet no longer inhabitable), gets caught trying to blow up a monument and is sent to a juvenile detention facility on Mercury. He's still a prisoner there 20 years later thanks to pan-solar collapse. Only now he wakes up in a medical facility having lost his arm with no memory of the past week. The local AIs inform him that they too have lost a week's worth of memories and that the station appears to have been abandoned by everyone except him. The AIs require him to retrieve his memories because unless the AIs can establish a definitive time-line of what happened, the station will catastrophically shut down.
Eddie also awakens to find a book in his possession, an ancient medieval manuscript that talks about the wanderings of a mysterious being through Prussia. We jump narratives between Eddie and this person and through the two of them we slowly reconstruct some of what happened during the missing week.
This book. like it's predecessor, is less about a straight-forward plot and more about impressions and moments. Given that it's tackling time and time-travel, the whole thing is a bit more disconnected than the previous volume. There's the usual looping and snaking time-line plots that recursively bring things together. Overall, it was a bit harder to follow than Venusia and I think the "past" story was developed more at the expense of the "present" story. It was an interesting and challenging read though. Plus, there was a fairly detailed mention of Napoleonic Wargamming and astronomy/astrology and Medieval super-tech so consider my neurons appropriately tickled.
later
Tom