In the Company of Others

Rating:
Summary: slow start, but a good read overall
Review: I liked Julie Czerneda's "In the Company of Others" well enough, but it's not a book I need to read again. I found two of the three main characters somewhat boring and annoying, the story too slow until the crisis point, and the ending a bit abrupt.
"In the Company of Others" has an extensive backstory, which is revealed in varying degrees of grace. It goes like this: in the future, humans have invented space travel (it's FTL, as is the communications tech, but is never discussed; this is a character, sociology, and xenobiology story) and have terraformed many barren worlds. However, these world were contaminated by the Quill, a formerly harmless alien species that has now become deadly; people on terraformed worlds die instantly, for no discernable reason. Tens of thousands of immigrants (immies) and many spacers ('siders) are trapped on space stations originally intended to house only a few thousand people. Earth has imposed a near-total quarantine on the stations, and has stopped space exploration and terraforming.
A generation after the Quill incursion, Dr. Gail Smith has a theory that the Quil on the terraformed worlds are genetically linked to the chief terraforming engineers for each world. She wants to test her theory on Pardell, a world whose coordinates were known only to Susan Witts, the chief of all the terraforming engineers, and the one who gave Quill as presents to the other terraformers. Gail comes to Thromberg Station, searching for Aaron Pardell, Witts's great-grandson, and his ship, the Merry Mate, which holds the only known record of Pardell's location. Pardell is more than just an anonymous 'sider, however; he was born on Pardell, and is the only person to survive an encounter with the Quill. He, however, doesn't know this.
The story follows Aaron, Gail, and Hugh Malley, Aaron's best friend, as they travel from Thromberg to Pardell, learning about each other and the Quill. The plot is fairly intricate; I won't attempt to describe it, because the Quill are supposed to be a mystery. (That said, I do think it's odd that nobody, Rosalind in particular, ever realized the source of Aaron's odd medical condition.) The chief supporting characters are interesting and well-drawn, and the Quill are satisfactorily alien aliens. However, I found Gail and Malley somehow flat, and often skimmed their sections, wanting to get back to Aaron. (To be fair, Gail does improve in the second half of the book.) There is a nicely understated love story, and a lovely conclusion. However, for some incomprehensible reason, Czerneda added a brief epilogue that completely threw me out of her world. It was completely unnecessary, and very grating.
"In the Company of Others" is a bit thick and intricate for light summer reading, but not especially deep or difficult. It's entertaining, with many good ideas and scenes, and probably worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: slow start, but a good read overall
Review: I liked Julie Czerneda's "In the Company of Others" well enough, but it's not a book I need to read again. I found two of the three main characters somewhat boring and annoying, the story too slow until the crisis point, and the ending a bit abrupt.
"In the Company of Others" has an extensive backstory, which is revealed in varying degrees of grace. It goes like this: in the future, humans have invented space travel (it's FTL, as is the communications tech, but is never discussed; this is a character, sociology, and xenobiology story) and have terraformed many barren worlds. However, these world were contaminated by the Quill, a formerly harmless alien species that has now become deadly; people on terraformed worlds die instantly, for no discernable reason. Tens of thousands of immigrants (immies) and many spacers ('siders) are trapped on space stations originally intended to house only a few thousand people. Earth has imposed a near-total quarantine on the stations, and has stopped space exploration and terraforming.
A generation after the Quill incursion, Dr. Gail Smith has a theory that the Quil on the terraformed worlds are genetically linked to the chief terraforming engineers for each world. She wants to test her theory on Pardell, a world whose coordinates were known only to Susan Witts, the chief of all the terraforming engineers, and the one who gave Quill as presents to the other terraformers. Gail comes to Thromberg Station, searching for Aaron Pardell, Witts's great-grandson, and his ship, the Merry Mate, which holds the only known record of Pardell's location. Pardell is more than just an anonymous 'sider, however; he was born on Pardell, and is the only person to survive an encounter with the Quill. He, however, doesn't know this.
The story follows Aaron, Gail, and Hugh Malley, Aaron's best friend, as they travel from Thromberg to Pardell, learning about each other and the Quill. The plot is fairly intricate; I won't attempt to describe it, because the Quill are supposed to be a mystery. (That said, I do think it's odd that nobody, Rosalind in particular, ever realized the source of Aaron's odd medical condition.) The chief supporting characters are interesting and well-drawn, and the Quill are satisfactorily alien aliens. However, I found Gail and Malley somehow flat, and often skimmed their sections, wanting to get back to Aaron. (To be fair, Gail does improve in the second half of the book.) There is a nicely understated love story, and a lovely conclusion. However, for some incomprehensible reason, Czerneda added a brief epilogue that completely threw me out of her world. It was completely unnecessary, and very grating.
"In the Company of Others" is a bit thick and intricate for light summer reading, but not especially deep or difficult. It's entertaining, with many good ideas and scenes, and probably worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Could not finish
Review: I was unable to finish this book. I purchased it because I liked her previous books: Beholders Eye, Changing Vision and A Thousand Words for Stranger. In "Company," Czerneda trys to emulate Cherryth's stationer universe, however, she fails to pull it off by a wide margin. Too much of the background is far too implausable, even for SciFi. That a space going society would suddenly retreat to stations, merely because something makes a few terraformed worlds uninhabitable, and cease all other commerce would not happen. Hopefully, after this one she will return to the the universe created in her previous books and stay there.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I would seldom give any book a 5* rating. However, I come close with this book. I have read a few Julie Czerneda's books and I have enjoyed them all. Her characters are enjoyable to read about and their interactions with each other are interesting as well. This book about earth settlers being stuck on space stations because the terra-formed planets are now deadly because of the Quill was fascinating. Czerneda does a great job in bringing her characters to life and getting you involved in their situations. In fact i would recommend you read all of her books. I plan to!

Rating:
Summary: I debated with myself on this one.
Review: I'm such an avid book reader that I was surprised that my foolish book store sales person didn't show me this author. Not that Julie E. Czerneda is a bad author, I was angry at the sales person for not letting me know abut this author for so long. I kind of understand why.

The author's story telling is top quality work, I actually felt for the main characters in the story and the trials and tribulations that they experience. The story moves along very nicely with only a few droll spots that tempted me to skip over. However, that's where the skill of this author ends.

Being a hard core Sci-Fi freak, I was disappointed by some glaring inconsistencies. For example the ships used tapes that has to be ejected and reversed to control the ships through space and yet ship's logs are stored in data cubes. Space suits are patched with rolls of tape, despite the lack of supplies on a space station. The description of the space station lacks clarity. The outer ring(?) requires gravity units so it can be livable, or is it the recycling center? Communication is possible in deep space in real time? What is all this? Your average reader may never notice, but for a die hard like myself, oops, big mistake. Reading this book was a bit like reading the earlier Robotech books, I had to gloss over the weird sub-par science to enjoy the juicy story in the book. I'm sure Julie E. Czerneda will improve with age, she has potential. She just needs to get a bit cozy with the space heads over at NASA.

If you're a techno freak then avoid this book, otherwise this would be a good read while relaxing in a hammock drinking lemonade.

Rating:
Summary: Involving, Absorbing Read
Review: I've come to look forward to each of Julie Czerneda's big, fat, juicy books -- and this one is no exception. Although the scope of her novel remains large, the focus on relationships and multiple viewpints keeps it involving. Like the best of her previous novels, A Thousand Words for Stranger, we get an inside glimpse of a not-human intelligence and the sense of being in its skin. Although the style is transparent and not showy, there were still very evocative images -- the graveyard of ships moored to the station, a lonely child's inability to touch another, a musty patchwork pressure suit -- that propell the narrative. It's also rather amazing that in such a short period of time, Czerneda has published five long, high quality works. I'm imagining a closet jam full of previously-written manuscripts , waiting for the first sale to start them tumbling down on readers' heads. I reco this for those who enjoy space opera that's still strong on character and insight.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of Flawed Potential
Review: If In the Company of Others were Jule Czerneda's first novel, it would receive an enthusiastic four stars. This is, however, her fifth and so flaws that would be acceptable in a novice become more glaring.

What do I mean? Czerneda's preface declares that writing third person is difficult; I suspect she talked herself into making it more difficult than it really is and ends up goofing. For example, there is ample italicized inner monologue, a device most often used to allow a third-person narrative to slip into first-person mode; Czerneda, for some reason, maintains the third-person perspective which is jarring. If there is to be no change in narrative voice, why the change in font?

There are other problems. The heroine, Dr. Gail "several middle names" Smith, is a top professor at a major university, commanding dozens of top scientists and with a budget that must be in the trillions. While her age, wisely, is never specified, she is never described as progidy, so she must be at least in her mid-30s - young enough to still be so attractive to every male character in the book, old enough to have reached her position. Yet she falls for a twenty-year old man, and engages in sexual banter with another twenty-year old. Cradle robber? Her personality is also at odds with her position; while our initial impression is of a tough, no-nonsense type, turns out she's weepy-eyed, indecisive, and maudlin. The same is true to a lesser extent of the hero, Aaron Pardell. All of which makes for an at times aggravating read.

Yet there is much good in In the Company of Others. The concept of space stations cut off from Earth with a population fighting off despair is an interesting one that Czerneda pulls off well, and the background story of how humanity got that way is fascinating. The alien Quill end up being satisfying as well, different than the usual bug-eyed aliens and also not a diatribe about human contamination.

If this were a first effort, I would be thrilled by the rich imagination and be looking forward to when Czerneda hits her stride. This is book five, however, and the stride should have been struck by now. I'm not sure if there was enough about In the Company of Others to warrant seeking out the author's other books; In the Company of Others itself will probably warrant another read down the line.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of Flawed Potential
Review: If In the Company of Others were Jule Czerneda's first novel, it would receive an enthusiastic four stars. This is, however, her fifth and so flaws that would be acceptable in a novice become more glaring.

What do I mean? Czerneda's preface declares that writing third person is difficult; I suspect she talked herself into making it more difficult than it really is and ends up goofing. For example, there is ample italicized inner monologue, a device most often used to allow a third-person narrative to slip into first-person mode; Czerneda, for some reason, maintains the third-person perspective which is jarring. If there is to be no change in narrative voice, why the change in font?

There are other problems. The heroine, Dr. Gail "several middle names" Smith, is a top professor at a major university, commanding dozens of top scientists and with a budget that must be in the trillions. While her age, wisely, is never specified, she is never described as progidy, so she must be at least in her mid-30s - young enough to still be so attractive to every male character in the book, old enough to have reached her position. Yet she falls for a twenty-year old man, and engages in sexual banter with another twenty-year old. Cradle robber? Her personality is also at odds with her position; while our initial impression is of a tough, no-nonsense type, turns out she's weepy-eyed, indecisive, and maudlin. The same is true to a lesser extent of the hero, Aaron Pardell. All of which makes for an at times aggravating read.

Yet there is much good in In the Company of Others. The concept of space stations cut off from Earth with a population fighting off despair is an interesting one that Czerneda pulls off well, and the background story of how humanity got that way is fascinating. The alien Quill end up being satisfying as well, different than the usual bug-eyed aliens and also not a diatribe about human contamination.

If this were a first effort, I would be thrilled by the rich imagination and be looking forward to when Czerneda hits her stride. This is book five, however, and the stride should have been struck by now. I'm not sure if there was enough about In the Company of Others to warrant seeking out the author's other books; In the Company of Others itself will probably warrant another read down the line.

Rating:
Summary: Solid one volume slice of the future
Review: In the Company of Others is a character-driven future history novel in which the drive for space terraforming and colonization is ruined by a particularly interesting ecological mistake by the early terraformers. The sense that the "adversary" is not some set of bug-eyed aliens, but instead a mistaken spread of a species by the humans themselves, is a very appealing plot device. The characterization is overall very good. The narration is in third person, and all but one of the central relationships is believable. There are a few "stock" 'spacer maverick' and 'loyal soldier' type characters, and the central love story in the work seems to arise from fairly whole cloth. Still, these flaws are overshadowed by the fact that In the Company of Others uses its central dilemma as a workable platform to make points about the problems of communication and interconnection. So many times science fiction seems to be caught between trite and trivial emotional content and some contrived "hard" science. In the Company of Others manages to tell a whole working space opera in a single volume, without needless tech-obsession or undue maudlin content. This is a worthwhile read, enjoyable as a golden age novel, but less imprisoned by the conventions of that time.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Sci-Fi Adventure
Review: In the Company of Others, there are a few crusial elements that all come together in Sci-Fi. One is science and the other is fiction. They both come together in a very good novel.
Aaron Pardell is a human with very strange characteristics. When touched, he is thrown into shock and the person who touched him too. He and his friend Malley live on an over crowded space station where they carved out a living.
But then, Earth scientist Gail Smith comes to the station to find Aaron. She is trying to find a way to eliminate the quill, an alien species that drove off the human settlers from their worlds. Aaron might be the only survivor. Gail must win his trust and help, and they set off for Pardell's World, where Aaron was born.
This was a very good read. I liked the detial that was put into it. This is especially apparent when the scenes are in the stations, for the way that the three different human cultures are interacting is brillient.
The only poor things that I could find about the book was that there was a little too much detail and it is slow to read. There were also some small subplots that didn't go any where, and it also took away from the book.
Other than that, this is a very good, Grade A, Sci-Fi novel.