Rating: 
Summary: Quakers and Science Fiction don't always make "Friends"
Review: Molly Glass is an eloquent writer whose characters are extremely well wrought -- if somewhat banal. The idea of a multi-generational ship full of Quakers from all over Earth is, ummm, unique? But why? They have their Friends meetings and encounter some very basic problems along the way -- but nothing to write home about. It is a shame that the plot ultimately didn't live up to the quality of the prose. There is a good scientific foundation and some brilliant expository on human passions. Worth the read, but don't try finding anything tremendously unique from a science fiction angle
Rating: 
Summary: A luminous book
Review: Quite simply the best science fiction novel I've read in a decade. Deeply imagined, gorgeously told.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite read this year¿ visionary and human
Review: The Dazzle of Day is a wonderful, wonderful book. I feel Gloss approaches the same place Le Guin does in, say, Always Coming Home and which McIntyre does in Dreamsnake. She hands me an egalitarian future and then deals with how a genuinely egalitarian society might function. How are decisions made? How is the sense of community, the needs for support, love, family, privacy, maintained? I was thoroughly charmed by this novel. Each chapter is told in limited third person from a new character's point of view, though occasional characters are revisited later. The emphasis is on older women (though perhaps I particularly warmed to the presence of a few of them and assumed they were being emphasized). The opening is a woman just down the road, elderly and without children, trying to make the decision to voyage off into space with a colony ship from earth. This is a post-holocaust sf novel, the world is in a sorry state. The next chapter jumps ahead 170 years to another mature woman who faces with her community the discovery of a marginally habitable planet. Do they deplane and begin a new life on this chilly unknown world or keep looking while enjoying a relatively easy and carefree shipboard existance? The final chapter again plunges us forward to a mature woman rescuing survivers of a downed space shuttle bringing salvage from that same colony ship. In between Gloss shows me fathers and mothers, husbands and wives; she visits passion, compassion, and a rape; she takes me into selfish, frightened, and courageous hearts. I care about these people and their lives and dreams. The Dazzle of Day has the same plain-spoken grit of Jump off Creek but is richer and more poetic, more hopeful in the broader story it tells. This is not one woman making solitary decisions, but individuals struggling to keep the human heart alive in community.
Rating:
Summary: Quite good
Review: The story was very enjoyable, but a little slow. The story is told from the point of view of many people. The first chapter is split between two people, while each of the other chapters is a “time in the life of†one of the characters. The chapter breaks sometimes feel a bit jarring, as the reader has to figure out how much time has passed since the last chapter.
The book is not gallant, romantic, or exciting. It’s simply real. It focuses on small details, like the loss from the death of cats or army ants on the ship. It also focuses on the psyche of each character, so that each character is eventually quite richly fleshed out.
The use of Esperanto is nice, and it was fun practice for me.
While I would recommend it, my only two problems with the book were the sudden shifts in time, and the fact that the author sometimes focuses on very odd details. Otherwise, it’s probably one of the most realistic portrayals of life aboard a generation ship, and the psychological effects on the colonists, in print. (I think one of the most interesting parts was a dialogue about the sky.)
Rating:
Summary: Quite good
Review: The story was very enjoyable, but a little slow. The story is told from the point of view of many people. The first chapter is split between two people, while each of the other chapters is a “time in the life of†one of the characters. The chapter breaks sometimes feel a bit jarring, as the reader has to figure out how much time has passed since the last chapter.
The book is not gallant, romantic, or exciting. It’s simply real. It focuses on small details, like the loss from the death of cats or army ants on the ship. It also focuses on the psyche of each character, so that each character is eventually quite richly fleshed out.
The use of Esperanto is nice, and it was fun practice for me.
While I would recommend it, my only two problems with the book were the sudden shifts in time, and the fact that the author sometimes focuses on very odd details. Otherwise, it’s probably one of the most realistic portrayals of life aboard a generation ship, and the psychological effects on the colonists, in print. (I think one of the most interesting parts was a dialogue about the sky.)
Rating: 
Summary: Boring and Dull...Just like Real Life
Review: This is a science fiction novel which has explores the human predicament through multiple third person views. Members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have left earth in a self-sustaining vessel to colonize a new planet. The story explores the relationship of the Friends' method of governance by consensus, fear of change and family. The subject matter was more mundane than is normal for a 'hard' science fiction novel and the change of persective brought interesting insight into how humans live. All-in-all I found it somewhat dull and neither the story-line nor the characters gripped me.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid, Fresh Take On the Multigenerational Starship Saga
Review: This is indeed an engrossing, character-driven tale of life aboard a multigenerational starship, told from the perspective of several women at the onset of the journey, towards the end of the voyage, and once the colonists have disembarked. Molly Gloss' sparse, lyrical prose is quite akin to Ursula K. Le Guin's. Much to her credit, Ms. Gloss gives an invigoratingly fresh look at the old multigenerational starship saga, told from the viewpoint of the common folk, not the community leaders or the starship's command crew. Anyone interested in a mature vision of science fiction shall not be disappointed with this slender tone. I eagerly await publication of Ms. Gloss' subsequent science fiction novels.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, slow, hard to figure out?
Review: This must be one of the more unconventional approaches to SF in general and generation ships in particular.The story is slow-moving. We get into the heads of about five different viewpoint characters of different ages, sexes and professions, and stay with them for large parts of the book. In the end, I have a pretty good idea about life on the generation ship; how it works, how they reach decisions, what they eat, how they marry, how they date and how they simply live together. Nothing really exciting ever happens, it's a very calm, steady story. This feels very different from most other SF I've read, where something *happens*. Here, I came away from the story with an understanding of life on the ship, but not much more. I don't know if there IS more to take from this book and I just haven't found it yet (that's what I suspect), or if that's actually what the story is about. I liked the use of Esperanto names and phrases, it made for a nice background. The technological background seemed okay to me. It blended nicely into the general framework of the story. Only four stars, because the ending left me musing over the story and what exactly it all meant, and I still haven't made up my mind.
Rating:
Summary: A thought provoking read
Review: _The Dazzle of Days_ is an sf book full of extraordinary happenings--it's starts with a suicide out on a solar sail and has shipwreck and life altering decisions in it--but it's not an adventure story. The people in it--Utopian Quakers, felt right to me since they are the kind of idealist who mirror the Puritans in New England and the Quakers who settled Pennsylvania, and so many other groups who decided to settle a new land--and the Mennonites today who are settling in South America or the Japanese in Brazil. There's no leader in this story, no bright shining person or anti-hero. This is more like my life. More the way that things seem to actually get done in my experience. But full of delightful touches, of wild birds and ants and complicated marriages. I wouldn't have liked this book when I was twenty-five, and it's charms are not perhaps for every one. But this was, for me, one of the finest books published in the last couple of years.
Rating:
Summary: Subtle and lyrical
Review: _The Dazzle of Days_ is an sf book full of extraordinary happenings--it's starts with a suicide out on a solar sail and has shipwreck and life altering decisions in it--but it's not an adventure story. The people in it--Utopian Quakers, felt right to me since they are the kind of idealist who mirror the Puritans in New England and the Quakers who settled Pennsylvania, and so many other groups who decided to settle a new land--and the Mennonites today who are settling in South America or the Japanese in Brazil. There's no leader in this story, no bright shining person or anti-hero. This is more like my life. More the way that things seem to actually get done in my experience. But full of delightful touches, of wild birds and ants and complicated marriages. I wouldn't have liked this book when I was twenty-five, and it's charms are not perhaps for every one. But this was, for me, one of the finest books published in the last couple of years.
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