Armies of Review
Dec. 13th, 2008 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So today I finished up Armies of Memory by John Barnes. This is the fourth (and final?) entry in his Thousand Cultures series.
In the near-future, local solar systems are colonized by individual cultural groups and then Earth becomes a monoculture and tunes out. Later, a teleportation device called the Springer gets invented and now there's sudden re-contact. Cultures that grew up in isolation now have to contend with one another. Keeping the peace is the Office of Special Plans who work to keep the various Cultures from going off the deep end.
The hero of the series, Giraut Leones is celebrating his fiftieth birthday by releasing a new album of work. But then a bunch of people try to kill him. And then he gets a message that another collection of humanity, beyond the reach of the Thousand Cultures wants to talk to him and as bait, they've got the recorded personality of his former boss and spymaster.
It's a good ending to the series. A lot of the issues about self and artificial intelligence are explored and it all comes together pretty nicely. Several underlying bits of backstory get unearthed and a number of things you saw in previous books suddenly makes a lot more sense.
All in all, it's been a pretty good series and I recommend it. Not quite Banks or Asher level of sci-fi, but it some ways it thinks about the issues they raise more fully and tries to tease out possible outcomes.
later
Tom
So today I finished up Armies of Memory by John Barnes. This is the fourth (and final?) entry in his Thousand Cultures series.
In the near-future, local solar systems are colonized by individual cultural groups and then Earth becomes a monoculture and tunes out. Later, a teleportation device called the Springer gets invented and now there's sudden re-contact. Cultures that grew up in isolation now have to contend with one another. Keeping the peace is the Office of Special Plans who work to keep the various Cultures from going off the deep end.
The hero of the series, Giraut Leones is celebrating his fiftieth birthday by releasing a new album of work. But then a bunch of people try to kill him. And then he gets a message that another collection of humanity, beyond the reach of the Thousand Cultures wants to talk to him and as bait, they've got the recorded personality of his former boss and spymaster.
It's a good ending to the series. A lot of the issues about self and artificial intelligence are explored and it all comes together pretty nicely. Several underlying bits of backstory get unearthed and a number of things you saw in previous books suddenly makes a lot more sense.
All in all, it's been a pretty good series and I recommend it. Not quite Banks or Asher level of sci-fi, but it some ways it thinks about the issues they raise more fully and tries to tease out possible outcomes.
later
Tom
