Divergence
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Review
"Ballantyne handles an intricate future skillfully and oddly hopefully ... maintaining a fine balance between good characterization and a fast-paced plot."--"Booklist"
Review
"Ballantyne handles an intricate future skillfully and oddly hopefully ... maintaining a fine balance between good characterization and a fast-paced plot."--"Booklist"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
This is a sequel to 'Capacity' and has many characters in common. While not (on the face of it) as complex or as fast-paced as its predecesor, it does move steadily towards its tremendously thought-provoking climax. It's almost impossible to describe without giving the game away, but suffice to say that Ballantyne is tackling huge themes here, and doing it with great confidence. And if this book smacks at times of the mystical, well that's one of the things that great sci-fi can handle really well. Read this if you like the work of Cordwainer Smith (it has some themes in common, even though Ballantyne has a distictive voice of his own), or if you are an afficionado of literate, concept-driven science fiction. By the time I'd finished it I was proud to be a flawed human, and I think you will be too. It's only his third novel, as far as I know, but he just gets better and more ambitious. What is amazing is that he can carry it off so well.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Divergence in the final installment in Ballantyne's Watcher trilogy, which initially tells how an alien artifical intelligence (the Watcher) takes over the internet and becomes the benign dictator of a starfaring humanity.
In Capacity, the enigmatic but deadly Schrodinger Boxes are introduced, and the Watcher is seemingly helpless against this threat. Divergence resolves this story and has a couple of nice gags (although I kicked myself over the kittens).
One of the strengths of the series are the way it examines issues such as personality and reality, in a manner reminiscent of a tech-savvy Philip K Dick. The ending however is very bizarre, and the idea of a alien capitalist technological tyranny inspiring Christ is the icing on a very odd cake.
Worth reading, if only for the feeling as your jaw hits the floor at the end, but only 3 stars as a result.
In Capacity, the enigmatic but deadly Schrodinger Boxes are introduced, and the Watcher is seemingly helpless against this threat. Divergence resolves this story and has a couple of nice gags (although I kicked myself over the kittens).
One of the strengths of the series are the way it examines issues such as personality and reality, in a manner reminiscent of a tech-savvy Philip K Dick. The ending however is very bizarre, and the idea of a alien capitalist technological tyranny inspiring Christ is the icing on a very odd cake.
Worth reading, if only for the feeling as your jaw hits the floor at the end, but only 3 stars as a result.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a unfair review as I didn't have the patience to read this book through to the end. It's written in a stilted style that reminds me of Enid Blyton's Famous Five Books - but with the added irritation of occasional gratuitous profanities. Even if you have read other books in this series and enjoyed them, you might still want to read a few pages in the bookshop before you shell out money for this.
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