Artemis Review
Dec. 18th, 2011 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So this weekend I also finished up Artemis by Phillip Palmer. This is the latest installment of his "Debatable Space" books which is his future history to play in. There's a fair amount of high-tech stuff that mostly revolves around FTL communication, decent relativistic speed travel and really, really dodgy quantum teleportation.
The protagonist is, as you might expect, a woman named Artemis who comes from a quiet world or archivists and researchers but who comes equipped with a wide and deadly array of augmentations. One of the most important is her ability to interface directly with the quantum computers that ccontrol most planetary systems. Quite handy when you want to get information or control.
The book opens with Artemis in prison as step one in a complex plan to get revenge on a former lover and head of a criminal empire who mistreated her rather badly. She soon organizes a break-out from the prison and begins carving a bloody path of revenge which is eventually halted when the Earth government picks her up to enlist her services in bringing down even larger criminal scumbags whose aggressive expansionism is making more advanced alien races a little skeptical of this whole "let the humans live" deal.
So it's a revenge motif against high-tech super-psychos, which is very reminiscent of The Demon Princes series by Jack Vance. Palmer has a brisk writing style and while Artemis's narration (really a thought-record) can be a bit grating at times, he keeps the action going and he's got a lot of good ideas and some sly observations about modern living and how we use technology to both control and alienate ourselves. Overall it was a fun read.
later
Tom
So this weekend I also finished up Artemis by Phillip Palmer. This is the latest installment of his "Debatable Space" books which is his future history to play in. There's a fair amount of high-tech stuff that mostly revolves around FTL communication, decent relativistic speed travel and really, really dodgy quantum teleportation.
The protagonist is, as you might expect, a woman named Artemis who comes from a quiet world or archivists and researchers but who comes equipped with a wide and deadly array of augmentations. One of the most important is her ability to interface directly with the quantum computers that ccontrol most planetary systems. Quite handy when you want to get information or control.
The book opens with Artemis in prison as step one in a complex plan to get revenge on a former lover and head of a criminal empire who mistreated her rather badly. She soon organizes a break-out from the prison and begins carving a bloody path of revenge which is eventually halted when the Earth government picks her up to enlist her services in bringing down even larger criminal scumbags whose aggressive expansionism is making more advanced alien races a little skeptical of this whole "let the humans live" deal.
So it's a revenge motif against high-tech super-psychos, which is very reminiscent of The Demon Princes series by Jack Vance. Palmer has a brisk writing style and while Artemis's narration (really a thought-record) can be a bit grating at times, he keeps the action going and he's got a lot of good ideas and some sly observations about modern living and how we use technology to both control and alienate ourselves. Overall it was a fun read.
later
Tom
