June Books 24) Nexus, by Ramez Naam

[nwhyte]

How did this happen? I was almost all caught up with bookblogging, and then slacked off for a week or so; and I'm still half a dozen books behind for June. I guess last week's fairly frenzied attempts to meet with new and returning MEPs didn't help. This coming week is a Strasbourg week which will give me a bit more slack

Comments

[whswhs]

I've read Crux but not Nexus. I'm afraid that I'm not going to go back and read Nexus; the characters in Crux never became people for me, not for a moment. That is, I saw their actions, shown through their own or each other's eyes, and I read their dialogue and the passages about their internal thoughts, but I never got the sense of any of this coming from a distinctive individual with a definite character or identity, and in fact it was hard for me to tell any of the characters apart. I never have that problem with Stephenson's writing.

[autopope]

You may be unsurprised to learnthat the Chinese government gets a shoe-ing in sequel "Crux" (at least, the early draft I saw). Naam is about the clearest-eyed American SF author I've read in recent years where it comes to the evils of Empire as a political style. (He's not a libertarian: he's just not automatically pro-west, or pro-east for that matter.)

[nwhyte]

Yep, Naam himself made the same point to me on Twitter.