Dust

"The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it. And that is fine and just. For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.” Loads of interesting concepts and wonderful writing in Elizabeth Bear's Dust (Jacob's Ladder #1). The story, set on a generational ship, is driven by divergent evoluti......more

Dust is a difficult book to review. It is a work of glorious genre- and gender-bending. It had moments of hilarity and moments of heartbreak, and way more sensawonder than any book I've read this year (including Zelazny's Lord of Light and M. John Harrison's Light). But the characters were ciphers t......more

I keep hearing Elizabeth Bear in all my regular haunts, I knew she had a lot of writing with nanotech, heavy-sf, and mythology, all of which I'm particularly fond. So why haven't I picked up her works before now? I'm an idiot. I can't think of a more accurate reason. So here I am, reading Dust and se......more

This was an excellent, sometimes-surrealistic, sometimes-ultra-realistic story of angels and knights and computer avatars trying to save/take over/destroy a huge, almost-decrepit generational starship that has become the 'world' to a human population. This is an extremely hard book to review, I find.......more

Jacob's Ladder is a generation ship, launched by an unusual religious cult, now stranded in orbit around a double star. After 500 years of drifting in orbit, the ship damaged and the the ship's AI fragmented into multiple units that have been dubbed Angels, the ship's population is divided into sepa......more