Jonathan Palfrey

Although Peters had written at least seven unrelated novels before this one, it was here that she finally struck gold. This American author made the mildly audacious decision to write a novel from the viewpoint of a 19th-century Englishwoman, set it mostly in Egypt, and mix in elements of archæology, crime, comedy, and romance. The mixture works remarkably well.

Peters was already an Egyptologist and knew her stuff in that respect. She was accustomed to writing crime stories with a dash of humour. But here she reached a higher level of characterization and humour than she'd achieved before. This story of a resourceful feminist let loose in Egypt in 1884 is truly hilarious and most entertaining, especially from being told in the first person.

It was followed in due course by numerous sequels giving the further adventures of Amelia Peabody and her expanding circle of family, friends, and enemies. The sequels are in general more serious than this first book, giving more emphasis to crime and adventure. However, outbreaks of hilarity continue to occur from time to time. I haven't read the whole series; my mother has, and reports some decline in quality in the later ones.

The Peters imitation of a Victorian-English writing style is quite effective in the first book, but later on she grows less careful and more Americanisms creep in. It must be hard for an American to weed out all of these without using the services of a British editor. For instance, I've noticed that Americans commonly assume the expression freshen up (used about oneself) to be generic English, whereas in fact it's an Americanism, and a relatively recent one: the earliest usage example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1961.

Elizabeth Peters is a pseudonym for Barbara Mertz (1927–2013).

It's taken me almost four months to get through this volume, a few stories at a time, and reading other books concurrently; but I've now read every story. I can report that the stories are readable, amiable, and imaginative in terms of science and technology.

As fiction, however, they're mostly unmemorable; and of course I'd already read the more memorable of them elsewhere. I think my favourite is “Second Dawn” (1951), which is an old friend: I first read it long ago.

Clarke generally seemed more interested and more skilled in the future of science and technology than in fiction. However, these stories are old: as he says himself in the foreword, a third of them were written “when most people believed talk of space flight was complete lunacy”. So they often seem rather quaint now that we're well into the 21st century.

For me, this collection wasn't really worth buying; except that, if I ever want a Clarke story, I now know where to find them all.

It's amazing to think that Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein were once regarded as the Big Three of science fiction. They all produced some memorable work, but on the whole their writings have dated badly by now. Science fiction does tend to age more rapidly than other kinds of fiction; especially science fiction about the future.

At some unspecified date in the not-near future, Abigail Gentian is a young woman who inherits a rich family business, specializing in human cloning.

She decides on an ambitious project, creating a thousand clones of herself, each imprinted with her own memories in full, to travel out and explore the galaxy in a thousand spaceships. Heedless of the family business that gave her the money to do this, she merges herself among the clones so that it's impossible to tell which one is really her, and goes out voyaging with them.

She's not the only one to take this route, but it's an exercise available only to the very rich, so there are relatively few groups of shatterlings (as they're known) venturing out into the galaxy.

They all have techniques of personal immortality, and also various methods of achieving suspended animation during long journeys. Reynolds respects the laws of physics, and so the spaceships in this book travel at sublight speeds, and journeys around the galaxy are very long indeed.

The shatterlings of Gentian Line travel around the galaxy (once around the galaxy is referred to as a circuit), stopping here and there to sample what's going on. Once per circuit, they all meet at a prearranged time and place, have a party, and exchange memories. I don't just mean that they chat: they have techniques for downloading memories, uploading memories, and managing memories spanning greater lengths of time than we can imagine. So they can all share each other's memories in a literal sense.

The plot of the story is that, for some reason initially unknown, some organization decides to exterminate Gentian Line. The traditional reunion party is ambushed and most of them are killed. The shocked survivors have to determine what happened and how to respond. It turns out that the ambush was not irrational: one of the Gentian shatterlings has unwittingly uncovered a potentially deadly secret, and their attackers believe themselves justified in their action, for reasons of galactic security (no less!).

Good points

Scenario: strong. I haven't seen this one before (extra points for originality), but in the context of the far future it's well imagined and plausible.

Characters: good. British sf authors are often better than American at characterization, if nothing else, and here we have some engaging and sometimes likeable characters. (Reynolds is a Welshman born in 1966.) I particularly like Purslane, the main female character. Note: Gentian shatterlings are of both sexes. Abigail wasn't inclined to limit herself to one, when two were available.

Writing style: good. These days sf is aspiring to higher literary standards than in the old days, and this one seems fully competitive to me.

Plot: perhaps not perfect, but it's interesting and exciting. Up to the standard of the book as a whole.

Not-so-good points

Anachronisms: most of the significant characters in this book are shatterlings of Gentian Line. Some six million years have passed since the birth of Abigail Gentian (who may or may not still be alive: as far as the book is concerned, this is unknowable). But the characters still talk and behave very much like the people we know today: they seem completely normal human beings. I doubt that this would really be the case. Six million years or more in the future, they still eat and drink things that would be completely familiar to us today: wine, coffee, croissants. Perhaps this is poetic licence, but I don't really buy it.

Privileged elite: is what the Gentian shatterlings are. Far richer individually than any normal being, their mode of existence is to joy-ride around the galaxy. They occasionally do good turns to civilizations they find on their way, whose whole lifespans are far less than theirs. Now and then they do some real work: they've somehow become experts on stardams, which are a way of enclosing stars that have gone nova, so that they don't destroy the surrounding area of space. The Gentians can't make stardams, which are relics of a long-dead but superior alien civilization; but they're experts in handling them. Because one stardam can preserve the existence of a whole civilization spanning many solar systems, I suppose they can make a lot of money this way. In whatever form money takes, that far in the future. Now, I'm not inclined to hate rich people: I'd like to be one of them, if I could. Nevertheless, a novel most of whose characters are filthy rich dilettantes leaves me feeling slightly uneasy, slightly alienated.

Replacement strategy: Despite their well-protected existences, every now and then a shatterling dies. About a hundred have gone by the start of the story (before the ambush). Why aren't they replaced? Surely Gentian Line wouldn't have lost the technology that started it off? Why not just make a new clone and download the stored memories into it? The shatterling is dead, long live the shatterling!

Subplot: the chapters of the book are interleaved with smaller flashback chapters in which Abigail Gentian, six million years in the past, gets addicted to a virtual reality game called Palatial, and almost loses her mind as she becomes entangled in it. Well, OK, but this seems to have no relevance to the main story, and I don't understand why it was included.

The rich get richer: is a sub-theme of the book. Gentian Line goes on and on and remains richer than most other groups, except the other similar Lines and a few abnormally persistent civilizations. I don't really buy this. Wealth is made to be squandered. Given sufficient time (six million years!), any family will run into a period of incompetence, be out-competed by upstarts, and sink into the general mass of humanity. Why not the Gentians?

Sentimentality: is a minor failing of an author who gets too fond of his pet characters. It's a rather endearing fault: there are many worse things that an author could be guilty of. It makes the ending of this book more agreeable but less plausible than it might have been. Take your choice.

Trivia

At one point in the book, the Gentians are embarrassed to encounter an ambassador from a distant civilization, because they happen to know that his entire civilization has been wiped out by an astronomical disaster. They don't like to tell him. Well, would you? (Come to think of it, it's not clear why the Gentians have the news but he hasn't. Ordinary radio waves travel at light speed.)

In the story you can find a spaceship named Fire Witch and two humanoid robots named Cadence and Cascade: clear signs that the author, born in 1966, has recently been listening to King Crimson albums released in 1969 and 1970. There are probably other amusing references that I don't happen to recognize.

In which Granny Weatherwax has to fight her evil sister, and Greebo the cat briefly becomes human. The trouble with this one is that Pratchett is trying too hard to make points and lecture, whereas I just want to read a good story and be entertained. However, it has its moments.First appearance of Casanunda (briefly mentioned in the preceding book, [b:Reaper Man 833424 Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2) Terry Pratchett https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1473122828l/833424.SY75.jpg 1796454]).

The second Moist von Lipwig book, in which he's transferred against his will from the Post Office to the Royal Mint and Bank of Ankh-Morpork, which he proceeds to turn upside-down in various ways. Neither the story nor the characters are particularly memorable by Pratchett's standards, but the book is witty and entertaining and perhaps even mildly educational, and ends not merely with a flourish but with a series of flourishes. The chief baddy (Cosmo Lavish) is rather tiresome.

This is one of Pratchett's best books. Although he's thought of as a comedian, it's also one of his most serious books.

His main regular hero, Samuel Vimes, is thrown back in time about thirty years, to the darker days of his own youth, when Ankh-Morpork was ruled by a paranoid tyrant and was about to rebel. It's a dangerous, almost lawless place, and this is an edgy, absorbing story, hard to put down; it won the Prometheus Award in 2003, which must have come as a bit of a surprise.

It's interesting to fill in some of the history of Ankh-Morpork and to meet various familiar characters when they were young.

I deduct a star for Pratchett's tendency to moralize, which I find a bit intrusive, and for the business with the monks, which I think could have been handled more briefly and neatly (or perhaps even completely omitted).

Terry Pratchett has a tendency, especially in his later books, to make points about morality and politics, which I think a novelist should try to make in a more inconspicuous manner. Furthermore, I have the impression that he has strong opinions about decency but lacks a well-defined ideology and morality. On the political front especially, he dodges the question by conveniently providing his modern Ankh-Morpork with a relatively benign dictator aided by a chief of police with a heart of gold (Samuel Vimes). This is a good solution only if such unlikely people manage to work their way to the top. When they die, what then?

The trouble with anthologies is that they tend to contain no more than one or two stories that are really worth having; and so it is here.Flynn's [b:The Forest of Time - Hugo Nominated Novella 11539011 The Forest of Time Michael Flynn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1570130951l/11539011.SY75.jpg 16478070] is a great story, one of my favourites; though I later bought it as a separate item for Kindle, so I don't need to go back to this book for it. Five stars.Turtledove's “Must and Shall” is not one of my favourites, but it's quite striking and memorable, worth reading more than once. One of his better efforts (I'm not a big Turtledove fan). Say three and half stars.The other stories here are generally competent and readable, but I could easily live without them.Something I notice as a non-American is that they're mostly about American history. The Sprague de Camp story is about ancient European history, but the narrator is a time-travelling American. The only story with no American connection at all is Silverberg's: it's one of the better stories in his [b:Roma Eterna 851384 Roma Eterna Robert Silverberg https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348262963l/851384.SY75.jpg 1965569] series (I later read the whole series but wasn't keen on it).I have no objection to American history: my favourites include various stories about it. But, when I read a whole collection of alternative-history stories and most of them are about American history, I start thinking, “What, AGAIN?” The USA has a short history, currently less than 250 years, and writers tend to concentrate on the four major wars of American history. Indeed, one of the strengths of Flynn's story is that its turning point is in an obscure and neglected part of early American history.Turtledove manages to cram the Civil War and the Second World War into the same story, without even using time travel.

This is a book of 742 pages in hardback, thick with historical and personal detail; but it's well written and not difficult to get through. I read it in three consecutive days, during which I had other things to do that prevented continuous reading.

The good points are the sense of historical authenticity (though I haven't studied the period and can't judge its accuracy) and the wide variety of well-drawn characters. By the time you've finished it, you've really experienced the English Civil War.

Bad points? I think you need some interest in the historical background, because in a sense the book is about the history; the characters seem to have been chosen as examples of people who lived through it (or, in some cases, failed to do so). The characters are of some interest in themselves, but they are team players rather than big stars. At times the pace of the story slows to allow some history to be explained.

From my personal point of view, this is not the kind of book I'd normally choose to read. I read it because I've read and liked other books by the same author. However, it's the story of how various typical people experienced the English Civil War, and naturally they had a pretty bad time on the whole.

I generally prefer stories in which the hero gets to the end having made some significant achievements, and having had good as well as bad experiences on the way. In particular, I like a happy ending. This story is more realistic than that: it tells of ordinary people suffering and having only minor achievements. So from my point of view it's a long story that's relatively downbeat all the way, and I'll probably never get around to rereading it. As a general rule, I don't normally give more than two stars to books I'm unwilling to reread, so this gets two stars. This is not an ‘objective' assessment of its quality: all ratings are subjective. My ratings indicate how much each book appeals to me personally, and how often I'm likely to reread it.

This is a theatrical autobiography by an actress mainly known for appearing in Doctor Who, although it also covers the rest of her career. I don't read many theatrical biographies and I'm not a huge fan of Doctor Who, so it's taken me almost six years after publication to acquire a copy of this book, but I have enough interest in both subjects to enjoy it all the way through.

Elisabeth Sladen made her first appearance in Doctor Who at the end of 1973, during my second year at university, and I liked her at the time: she seemed somewhat less helpless than the Doctor's previous companions.

She wasn't confident enough to write an autobiography by herself, and engaged Jeff Hudson as co-writer to help her with it, so I think he should be visibly credited here (as he is in the book itself). The result of their joint effort is more conversational than literary: it's like sitting in her living room while she talks her way through her past. That's one way to do an autobiography, and works well enough in this case.

The book is very readable and rather charming; at least for me, it never becomes boring. I suppose Jeff Hudson's role was to edit, to advise on what to cut or shorten, to arrange the text in coherent order, and so on, while preserving her own way of saying things. It certainly reads like a personal memoir, in which the hand of the co-author remains invisible.

Readers can learn a good deal about the actor's life in general and about working on Doctor Who in particular, and there are plenty of anecdotes about all the people she met. She must have had a good memory for all the details, as it's hard to imagine that she had time to keep a diary while working.

She was devoted to acting: she wasn't a fan of science fiction nor even of Doctor Who, which she didn't normally watch when she wasn't in it. It was just one of her many theatrical jobs. But it happened to be as Sarah Jane Smith that she became widely known and popular, and she recognizes it by devoting most of the book to her involvement with that character—which was still continuing at the time of her rather sudden and early death.

The story is quite gripping and varied, but Leary and his crew go through their usual ordeals for relatively little payoff this time, either for them or for the reader; so it winds up being a little disappointing. The main beneficiaries of all the action are the people of Zenobia, a backwater planet.

In which Kai is kidnapped and imprisoned by the Fae, and Irene dashes off to attempt the unlikeliest of rescues. In the face of antagonists whose powers greatly exceed her own, she has no plan and no resources, other than her wits and her Language. Followers of Doctor Who will be familiar with this way of tackling problems.

It's quite fun at first reading, but so far I don't think the characters, the stories, or the scenario are good enough for this series to become one of my favourites. Although at least I'm buying the books, which I suppose is the main thing from the author's point of view.

The first time I read this book, I thought it was pleasant, but there seemed to be something missing.

On second reading, I realized that the book is differently oriented, compared with most of the sf that I've read. I've been reading sf for well over 50 years, and generally speaking the point of it is that you enjoy the scenario, the plot, and the situations. The characters are there to implement the plot, and to serve as incidental decoration. If the characters are good, so much the better, but they're not the main point of the thing.

In this book, the characters and their interactions are the main point of the thing. The plot serves to provide a series of opportunities for them to interact in new ways. There's certainly a plot, but it's episodic, and secondary to the characters. Once I understood this, I appreciated the book better. Although I like some episodes better than others.

Broadly speaking, the scenario is not unusual. It's a future universe with interstellar travel, in which humans interact with various other intelligent species from other solar systems. But this one is somewhat original in its details, and carries conviction, being well imagined in some depth. The author isn't just making it up as she goes along, she probably has detailed background notes and knows more about her universe than she's telling us.

The book struck me as pleasant even at first reading, because the main characters are mostly likeable and good company; although there are also some characters that are less likeable and even malevolent. When she has time, the author tries to explain things from their point of view, to show why they behave in that way. I like that.

It comes as a relief to get through a novel in good company, after all the other novels out there in which the company is less congenial. The characters suffer serious problems at times (thus making a story of it), but on the whole this is a feel-good story with a positive attitude. The snag is that the likeable characters are rather too likeable to be completely plausible, giving me a slight sensation of watching a jolly children's television programme.

We have here a universe in which humans are not the Top Species: they're working their way up from the bottom. However, they're making progress, and are at the time of the story adequately respected by most other species. The other species are devised with varying degrees of ingenuity; the most interesting are the Sianat Pairs, who co-exist with a virus that gives them a unique ability but shortens their lifespan; and the Aeluons, who communicate with each other by rapidly changing the colours of their skin. Aeluons lack voices and need artificial talkboxes to communicate with other species.

Overall, this book is a good effort for a first novel, enjoyable and worth rereading. Full marks for world-building.

The story is divided quite sharply into separate chapters with distinct themes, almost like a connected series of short stories; that's not necessarily a fault, but most novels seem to flow more smoothly, somehow.

The characters seem slightly too cute. However, we come to know each of them in some detail, not just their personalities but their backgrounds and secrets and worries. This is not a story that concentrates on one protagonist: all members of the Wayfarer's crew are more or less equal protagonists, and are all given attention.

For about two-thirds of this book, the story seems fragmentary, there are a lot of different things going on but they're not especially interesting or engaging. Towards the end, it becomes more focused and exciting, but it also piles on the supernatural special effects, which tend to weaken the suspension of disbelief.The success of the series is based on bringing together the Metropolitan Police and the weird-but-plausible world of magic and more-or-less magical beings. As readers, we're willing to believe all this stuff for the length of a novel. But, when the author tries to take us to some other plane of existence outside the universe as we know it, the story begins to seem fanciful and less plausible. Fortunately, it doesn't happen often, but I'd prefer to do without it altogether. Terry Pratchett used to do something similar occasionally, which I didn't like either.At least a couple of good things happen: we finally get rid of the Faceless Man, and Molly becomes happier, gaining a companion of her own kind.Mr Punch created mayhem in [b:Rivers of London 9317452 Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1) Ben Aaronovitch https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1401385034l/9317452.SY75.jpg 13552476], and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that he's still hanging around in the background. I don't want him back for a repeat performance; but Lesley still has a major unresolved grudge against him. In this story, we learn more about him.

A lot of people seem to regard this series as an old friend, but I come to it completely fresh, and after reading the first book I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, it's a very standard fantasy that seems to have been created by reading Fantasy For Dummies and following the instructions. I don't specialize in fantasy and I've read only a limited amount of it; but, even so, nothing is very original or surprising about this one.

On the other hand, Eddings writes quite fluently and confidently, and the story makes pleasant light reading. If you want something to read on a journey, this would serve well.

I'd describe it as a book for adolescents that can also be read by adults. I don't think it's aimed directly at the adult reader. The central character is a boy of 14; the story hints that he has undiscovered powers. Well, if we find a 14-year-old boy as the central character of a fantasy series, and he turns out to have no special powers, that would be rather surprising, no?

Bear in mind that this book has a “to be continued” ending. If you want any real end of story, you have to buy more books.

I first read this book in 1982, when no Discworld books had been published, and Terry Pratchett was an unknown author. As far as I remember, I thought it wasn't a bad book, but it was an obscure oddity; I put it aside and didn't think again about the book or its author for years.At last I decided to read it again in 2024, and it's better than I remembered; indeed, it seems surprisingly better thought out and more coherent than the first two Discworld books. The story has a beginning and an end, and the plot travels from one to the other with only minor digressions.It's vaguely reminiscent of Larry Niven's [b:Ringworld 7987601 Ringworld Larry Niven https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1270514178l/7987601.SY75.jpg 924711], and could be considered as a sort of Terry Pratchett cover version of the same general idea, like the Jimi Hendrix version of Bob Dylan's “All Along The Watchtower”.[b:Ringworld 7987601 Ringworld Larry Niven https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1270514178l/7987601.SY75.jpg 924711] is quite a good book, but it's not my favourite of Larry Niven's books. This cover version is not necessarily better, but it's interestingly different. We're not talking about plagiarism here, but about creative reworking of a roughly similar idea.The early chapters are promising. The later chapters have a plot and a central concept, but they don't come over clearly enough, being somewhat obscured by details. At this early stage of his career, Pratchett didn't have quite the right skills to make a success of this kind of story, although he made a good try at it. Would he have been able to do better later on? I don't know. Although he started off writing science fiction (which this is), perhaps he was always better suited to fantasy.

This was a truly remarkable novel to be published in 1966 by a 24-year-old writer (who was 22–23 when he wrote it). It has a style and imagination that wasn't characteristic of most sf of the mid-1960s, and it survives well into the 21st century.

True, if you read it as a book written now, it could seem rather strange and clunky, and there are anachronisms in it. But it's silly to read a book from 1966 as though it were written now; would you treat Jules Verne or H. G. Wells like that?

As with all fiction set in the future, the bizarre and colourful universe it describes is surely not going to be our future. It's an imaginary future, in which the Alliance battles the Invaders, and spaceships have discorporate crew members and pilots reshaped by cosmetisurgery. In this imaginary future, they record sound on tapes and find some use for punched cards, and that's OK, because it's not our future; think of it as the future of some other timeline.

Babel-17 is the name of a language, and this is a story about the effects of language on how we perceive and understand the world around us. What the young Delany had to say about language wasn't necessarily correct in all respects, but it stimulates thought about the subject.

I've been rereading this book since the 1970s, and I still enjoy it: it's quite a trip. I notice now that the story skates glibly over a number of implausibilities, especially at the end, where everything is wrapped up rather quickly. My advice is to sit back and enjoy the trip without worrying about such things.

I'm not sure what to make of this one. It's good in its way, but I find it rather too complicated and serious overall—although of course there are bits of humour scattered through it.

It has Death's granddaughter Susan in it, whom I always like; Death himself is in quite good form, and his attendant Albert.

But I'm not normally keen on Pratchett's villains, and here we have a whole bunch of them: the Auditors, Mr Teatime, and his hired gang. I really think the Discworld would be better without the Auditors; they're grey and rather dull, and do nothing for me.

I still own a copy of this book marked “Reprinted August 1972”, so I suppose I first read it soon after that. I never became a fan, but I remember buying the sequel, which I liked even less.

I last read this one in 2004, and commented then in my diary that “It's not as bad a book as I expected; the scenario is well thought out; only the characters and story-telling seem a bit crude, dated in style by now.”

This is a rather charming fantasy about life in early-Victorian London, in which the young Dodger of the title comes from the humblest of beginnings and goes up in the world.

The scenario is all based on quite interesting factual research and there's no magic in it, but I call it a fantasy because Terry Pratchett is a softie, and various characters in this book, including the hero, are too full of human goodness to be credible. You have to suspend disbelief in that respect.

The book is vaguely similar to his past City Watch books, set in the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork; but this one has a new scenario and a new set of characters.

Cautiously recommended if you're attracted by the idea of a book with a grittily realistic scenario populated by characters that would seem more at home in a fairytale. And yes, of course there is a happy ending.

In which the wizards find an unexpected financial reason to take up the game of football, an orc proves his worth, and we're treated to the love story of Trevor and Juliet. This is not one of the best Discworld stories, and the football content doesn't really interest me, but much of it is entertainingly written and there are some good new characters.

Towards the end, it becomes more serious and less entertaining.

In 1951, Eric Frank Russell wrote a memorable short story called “...And then there were none”, which he expanded in 1962 into this short novel. The short story remains as the final section of the novel, and is the best part of it; but the rest of the novel is amiable enough.

The prologue explains amusingly how Johannes Pretorius van der Camp Blieder spent his life trying to levitate a penny, and came up with a device that turned out to be a faster-than-light spaceship drive, subsequently named the Blieder drive. As a result of this invention, the Great Explosion occurred, in which the most independently minded 50% of the human race left Earth to colonize other planets throughout the galaxy.

Centuries later, Earth decided that it should try to organize humanity into some kind of empire, and it sent out an ambassador with military support to make contact with a few of these planets.

The first planet was originally used as a place to dump criminals, and is now divided into many small independent settlements that retain a basically criminal mentality. It's unpromising and the ship moves on.

The second planet was colonized by nudist health fanatics. The ship drops off a consul with a small staff and moves on.

The third planet was colonized by a religious group who have all died out for some unknown reason. The ship doesn't dare to land, in case of disease.

The fourth planet was colonized by Gands, loosely inspired by Gandhi, who practice an interesting form of non-violent anarchy that seems to work. The crew of the ship, granted leave because the locals aren't hostile, find the place attractive and begin to desert and go native, so the ship takes off in a hurry while it still has enough manpower to function.

The original short story was about this fourth planet, which is both amusing and thought-provoking. I don't think Russell was really trying to convince us that their society could work in the real world, but he makes it seem to work as fiction, and he makes a comedy of it, so that we don't take it too seriously. I don't think it would work, as described, but I find it rather attractive anyway.

This is the middle book of the trilogy, and I remember that I originally thought it the weakest, probably because most of it is relatively quiet and uneventful—although it livens up towards the end. By now I like it better, because the quiet parts are at least quite pleasant and interesting.

I might be tempted to give it 4 stars. But, on the other hand, most of it doesn't have much plot—just the tale of diverse characters on a rather aimless journey. And I like a happy ending, which the author seems determined not to provide.

The large flightless bird Orn, with his fascinating racial memory, is an imaginative and memorable creation, brought to life very well. The book is worth reading mainly for the chapters written from his point of view.