Terminal World
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Product Description
Review
[A] wildly imaginative genre stretcher. {Reynolds] tells his tale with such verve that you just keep turning the pages. (Nevill Hawcock FINANCIAL TIMES )
A rousing adventure in a widly original setting. (Eric Brown THE GUARDIAN )
This is sci-fi as an intellectual balancing act. We're offered airborne battles and plenty of action too. It's almost the most convincing steampunk novel you'll ever read. (Jonathan Wright SFX )
There are flashes of the energy that drives the big sequences in the Revelation Space trilogy. (Maureen Kincaid Speller INTERZONE ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
A rousing adventure in a widly original setting. (Eric Brown THE GUARDIAN )
This is sci-fi as an intellectual balancing act. We're offered airborne battles and plenty of action too. It's almost the most convincing steampunk novel you'll ever read. (Jonathan Wright SFX )
There are flashes of the energy that drives the big sequences in the Revelation Space trilogy. (Maureen Kincaid Speller INTERZONE ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
TERMINAL WORLD is a snarling, drooling, crazy-eyed mongrel of a book: equal parts steampunk, western, planetary romance and far-future SF.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
81 of 91 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have to say that I strongly disagree with the rather indifferent reviews of this book posted so far. I have read all of Reynolds' books to date and this makes a strong claim to be his best.
For starters, and almost incidentally, it is the best steampunk novel I have read. Reynolds produces a plausible plot device for examining a society trapped at a particular technological point, and his steam or dieselpunk technology is grittily plausible and realistic, not a series of fashion accessories or nostalgic anachronisms, as is all too common in this genre.
Secondly, this book requires a bit of intellectual effort on the part of the reader. The reader is required to use some imagination and to draw inferences and make conclusions from tiny nuggets of fact dropped into the characters' conversations. The book contains no "infodumps". The true nature of Spearpoint is not spelled out directly, even at the end of the novel. An observant reader will fairly quickly come to a huge revelation about the nature of Spearpoint's world which never becomes remotely obvious to any of the characters involved. One particularly ironic point is the existence of a quasi-religious "Testament", which most of the characters dismiss as mythological, but the more objective viewpoint of the reader can see is largely historical fact about the planet's history.
There are also some excellent action scenes, particularly a desperate airship assault on the city in the face of progressive technological failures, reducing the crew from machine guns and diesel engines to cutlasses and crossbows in the space of ten minutes. The characters are excellent, particularly a foul mouthed bodyguard heroine.
If you like your SF one-dimensional and spoon fed to you as easily digestible gloop, this book probably isn't for you. If you are willing to use your intellect and your imagination to fill in the tantalising gaps left by the author you will be amply rewarded.
For starters, and almost incidentally, it is the best steampunk novel I have read. Reynolds produces a plausible plot device for examining a society trapped at a particular technological point, and his steam or dieselpunk technology is grittily plausible and realistic, not a series of fashion accessories or nostalgic anachronisms, as is all too common in this genre.
Secondly, this book requires a bit of intellectual effort on the part of the reader. The reader is required to use some imagination and to draw inferences and make conclusions from tiny nuggets of fact dropped into the characters' conversations. The book contains no "infodumps". The true nature of Spearpoint is not spelled out directly, even at the end of the novel. An observant reader will fairly quickly come to a huge revelation about the nature of Spearpoint's world which never becomes remotely obvious to any of the characters involved. One particularly ironic point is the existence of a quasi-religious "Testament", which most of the characters dismiss as mythological, but the more objective viewpoint of the reader can see is largely historical fact about the planet's history.
There are also some excellent action scenes, particularly a desperate airship assault on the city in the face of progressive technological failures, reducing the crew from machine guns and diesel engines to cutlasses and crossbows in the space of ten minutes. The characters are excellent, particularly a foul mouthed bodyguard heroine.
If you like your SF one-dimensional and spoon fed to you as easily digestible gloop, this book probably isn't for you. If you are willing to use your intellect and your imagination to fill in the tantalising gaps left by the author you will be amply rewarded.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Having really enjoyed some of Reynold's previous SF novels I was very disappointed with Terminal World. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the blurb regarding the setting and theme of the story.
Slow pace, plodding dialogue, poor characterisation, implausible premise riddled with inconsistencies.
It feels like the author has tried to jump on some kind of bandwagon (steampunk), but unfortunately failed to deliver. Iain Banks has done this kind of low-tech society in a high-tech universe so much better.
Several times I have considered giving up in this book, something I rarely do. I have decided to stick with it as 2/3 of the way through certain things happen that suggest it may yet get more satisfying in terms of ideas.
The delivery of said ideas really lets it down though.
I hope Alistair Reynolds goes back to what he's best at soon.
Slow pace, plodding dialogue, poor characterisation, implausible premise riddled with inconsistencies.
It feels like the author has tried to jump on some kind of bandwagon (steampunk), but unfortunately failed to deliver. Iain Banks has done this kind of low-tech society in a high-tech universe so much better.
Several times I have considered giving up in this book, something I rarely do. I have decided to stick with it as 2/3 of the way through certain things happen that suggest it may yet get more satisfying in terms of ideas.
The delivery of said ideas really lets it down though.
I hope Alistair Reynolds goes back to what he's best at soon.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Bar a couple of exceptions, I've enjoyed reading every novel by AR since Revelation Space burst forth many years ago. His last few novels (particularly House of Suns and The Prefect) have all begun to do 2 things. 1) Condense and accelerate the plot progression so that the books becone a little more "page turning" but without sacrificing the dynamics. 2) He has continued to leave strategic gaps in the readers knowledge - some of which has been inferred or partially viewed in the past - and for the most part this has been great (like the embryonic onset of the rust belt in The Prefect, or the machine race in House of Suns). From that regard Terminal World works well - the revelations about early technology are glimpsed, inferred, but never fully explained. I admit with a sense of perplexity that some of the narrative from Cutter to explain what he has witnessed seems a bit clumsy (kids-film-plot-explainer-line-of-dialogue etc) but this is a minor point. One reviewers comparison to Feersum Endjinn is fair enough - but that is a story with few peers, and let's be honest SF has delved into the wide eyed wonder of ancient revelations since Wells and Lovecraft - so I don't think it's completely fair to lambast Reynolds for doing the same. The point of this theme is always the same in that: nothing lasts forever, past civilisations were not necessarily any less gifted than ours, and that technology will ruin us all etc etc. So all in all taking this into consideration I thought the book moved well, at a good pace, with some interesting characters, set in an environment that, if a bit belief suspending, does make for a good read with some genuinely exciting episodes.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
I hate to write this but.......
Terminal world really was a huge let down.
Yes, it's nice to fill in the gaps as to where and when this takes place, but the story itself is still very dull. Read more
Yes, it's nice to fill in the gaps as to where and when this takes place, but the story itself is still very dull. Read more
Published 27 days ago by Mr. C. J. MacKenzie
Bit of a let-down
I'm a big fan of Reynolds' work in general, but this one didn't gel. It's an interesting premise, both in terms of the state of the world as presented and the future-history that... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Geeb
A game of two halves...
Let me preface this review by saying that I did like this book, despite everything that I'm going to say after this. Read more
Published 3 months ago by UbiquitousPhoton
A good book - full of ideas that don't quite gel
This is a conundrum of a book.. on the surface it is an adventure story , but the setting is quite bizarre and mysterious , and Reynolds doesn't seem to know if this is a puzzlebox... Read more
Published 3 months ago by WJ Davidson
Not his best, IMHO
I am a fan of AR's books, and have just finished reading Terminal World, and have to agree with other reviewers that this isn't his best, in my opinion. Read more
Published 3 months ago by ChrisKnight
Got better as it went along
This story is set on an Earth far in the future where an initially unexplained problem has caused sections of the world to have to exist at different technology levels - and this... Read more
Published 4 months ago by A. J. Sudworth
Steampunk? Steamingly poor.
I have read almost all of Alastair Reynolds books, and enjoyed them all thoroughly (with the exception of Absolution Gap, which was only passable). Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mr. Robert L. Seymour
Sadly lacking any of Reynold's trademark qualities.
Hmmm...not one of Reynold's finest, by any means. With none of his trademark taut storytelling and with a resolutely linear narrative and monolithic characters, this novel reads... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Willy Eckerslike
Not his best
I liked the general premise, but I did not find the story at all believeable. Considering the hatred the Swarm has for Spearpoint, the latter chapters of the book are simply... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Wisiwig
Too slow
I think that if this was the first AR book I had read I might have been impressed, especially as he is British. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Colin Wright
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