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.
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