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  • Re: Review: Halcyon Years, Alastain Reynolds

    From Titus G@3:633/10 to All on Thursday, June 11, 2026 16:20:20
    On 01/04/2026 17:25, Default User wrote:

    I will start posting some reviews of what I have been reading in the SF realm. I'll start with the most recent, which is Alastair Reynold's
    Halcyon Years.

    Yuri is a private eye, in a low-rent part of Belt City. His latest
    divorce job fell apart from equipment failure, leaving him at odds.
    Then a beautiful woman, Ruby Blue, walks into the office with a job for
    him, which traditionally works out smoothly for PIs.
    She brings a murder investigation.
    Thank you for bringing this to my attention and for your review.
    It started as a rather pedestrian detective story with the oddity of the
    name of the protagonist, Yuri Gagarin, an English speaking Russian who
    never uses articles so his identity when speaking was obvious. A further
    oddity was the memory issues of his robot, named Sputnik. The detective
    murder mystery quickly turned to action adventure with the main mystery
    being the nature of the science fictional world of Halcyon which is only gradually revealed so any synopsis will be spoilerish. I felt the change
    in several characters personalities to be implausible and the last
    chapter or two could have been replaced with the sentence: And they
    lived happily ever after but overall, I enjoyed it and recommend it but
    it is nowhere near the standard of his longer novels. Three stars.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Titus G@3:633/10 to All on Thursday, June 11, 2026 16:20:47
    On 04/04/2026 12:17, Default User wrote:
    Reynolds has a few relevant sketches on his blog of the Halcyon, which
    people might like to refer to while reading. As an engineer emeritus, I
    am unreasonably pleased by them being hand-drawn on quad paper.

    https://approachingpavonis.blogspot.com/2026/01/halcyon-sketches-spoiler-free.html

    Whilst reading, I was sometimes confused by his measurements.
    Halcyon is 50kms by 10km with the lake in the middle but the Urry
    property is described as being 40kms back. The map explained this.
    I can't get my head round huge numbers such as 2,200 years travelling at
    99% of the speed of light being equivalent to more than 15,000 years in
    the rest of the universe.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)