Tides of Light

Rating:
Summary: Highest-ranking Sci-Fi
Review: Gregory Benford is one of the few authors who don't betray science in their science-fiction. No Star Wars or Star Trek-like anthropocentrist grotesqueries in his Galactic Centre saga : the human "heroes", led and pushed rather than self-guided through our ruthless Milky Way, are little more than feral hunter-gatherers confronted to all-emcompassing alien plots. And this, even as they are routinely described as using technologies far beyond any cyberpunk gizmo ; in fact, Benford's complex and consistent characters face mind-staggering challenges, their own cultural inheritance being one amongst many. Even the classical galactic-scale plots found in Dune or the Foundation series are utterly reduced to naught compared with the (very) long-term projects of the past and present intelligences competing in Benford's universe. Now go and read this book, along with the five others in the series !

Rating:
Summary: A well-written and engaging narrative!
Review: Now away from Snowglade, Family Bishop must face terrifying new challenges on a devastated world. This book is something of a departure from the Galactic Centre storyline, yet Benford weaves a suspenseful and fascinating story involving a bizarre race of aliens.

Rating:
Summary: Big concept science fiction
Review: The "Great Sky River" series eschews the traditional science fiction device of portraying human beings as creatures apparently inferior to greater alien intelligences, yet having some indefinable superiority. How many stories, particularly as found in "Analog", have you read where humanity or an intrepid human explorer tricks superior (intellectually speaking) aliens by some sort of street smarts or idiosyncratic human trait ? Don't go looking for that smugness here. Fifty years ago John W Campbell challenged his writers to "show him a creature that thinks as well as a man only differently", but Benford has demolished the idea of mere equality in intellectual power between humans and aliens. The mechs and cyborg intelligences in this series are drawn as well as non-human aliens can be, their motivations and capabilities (as well as thought processes) are described without lapsing into merely "jazzing up" human characteristics. Benford's aliens are aliens in mind as well as physique and no reader can fathom their true nature. Benford's humans are hunter-gathers, appropriating technologies and materials they can not create themselves. William Tenn's description of humans as " rats in the walls" is carried to an extreme in "Tides of Light". Family Bishop merely dodges incomprehensible aliens and forces before fortune steers them to the next instalment. Benford has made an elegiac vision of the future, incorporating grandeur like Arthur C Clarke in "The City and The Stars" with a mysterious plot. The aliens are ALIEN and the humans are so different in physical nature amd cultural millieu as to be almost unbelievable. Strongly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Big concept science fiction
Review: The "Great Sky River" series eschews the traditional science fiction device of portraying human beings as creatures apparently inferior to greater alien intelligences, yet having some indefinable superiority. How many stories, particularly as found in "Analog", have you read where humanity or an intrepid human explorer tricks superior (intellectually speaking) aliens by some sort of street smarts or idiosyncratic human trait ? Don't go looking for that smugness here. Fifty years ago John W Campbell challenged his writers to "show him a creature that thinks as well as a man only differently", but Benford has demolished the idea of mere equality in intellectual power between humans and aliens. The mechs and cyborg intelligences in this series are drawn as well as non-human aliens can be, their motivations and capabilities (as well as thought processes) are described without lapsing into merely "jazzing up" human characteristics. Benford's aliens are aliens in mind as well as physique and no reader can fathom their true nature. Benford's humans are hunter-gathers, appropriating technologies and materials they can not create themselves. William Tenn's description of humans as " rats in the walls" is carried to an extreme in "Tides of Light". Family Bishop merely dodges incomprehensible aliens and forces before fortune steers them to the next instalment. Benford has made an elegiac vision of the future, incorporating grandeur like Arthur C Clarke in "The City and The Stars" with a mysterious plot. The aliens are ALIEN and the humans are so different in physical nature amd cultural millieu as to be almost unbelievable. Strongly recommended.