Product Description

Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. But something astonishing has just been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: mid-twentieth century Earth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #458883 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780441013074
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
In his latest SF novel, Reynolds (Absolution Gap) creates yet another quirky, noirish vision of humanity's future. Three centuries from now, a technologically induced catastrophe, the Nanocaust, makes Earth uninhabitable. Two versions of humanity—the Threshers, who live in a ring of habitats encircling Earth, and the Slashers, who inhabit the outer planets—each blame the other for the disaster. Both groups share access to a system of artificial wormholes, one of which turns out to contain a perfect copy of Earth, sealed off from the rest of the galaxy, at its far end. The Threshers send archeologist Verity Auger to investigate. On this subtly different version of Earth, Wendell Floyd, a second-rate detective and jazz musician living in Paris in the year 1959, is looking into a very odd murder. Then Auger shows up claiming to be the victim's sister and pursued by lethal creatures who look like decaying children. While Reynolds beautifully details this alternate-universe Paris and handles the developing mystery with aplomb, his Thresher and Slasher cultures lack depth and his climax feels a bit jury-rigged. Still, fans of sophisticated hard SF should be pleased.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Twenty-third-century Earth is an uninhabitable wasteland overrun by rogue nanotechnology. When archaeologist Verity Auger, studying the relics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Earth, is accused of reckless endangerment after a child in her care nearly dies, shadowy government forces within her department offer her an out in the form of a mission to retrieve information from somewhere where her knowledge of the mid-twentieth century will be useful. Not until she is well underway do they inpart that her destination is an ALS (anomalous large structure) at the end of a wormhole in which 1950s Earth, slightly changed, is preserved. At that other end of the wormhole, Wendell Floyd is a Parisian PI working a case that gets stranger and more dangerous as he and partner Custine uncover the evidence, which is precisely the information Verity must fetch. The threads come together in a race to save both Earths from extremists, in which Verity and Floyd frantically search for the significance and location of three metal spheres. Reynolds blends noirish sleuthing and hard sf remarkably well. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A darkly brilliant love story set in worlds we think we know but don't. -- Guardian [UK]

Reynolds possesses the true and awesome widescreen SF imagination. -- Locus

There is a casual brilliance to Reynolds' imagination. -- SF Site

Customer Reviews

Kind of a big disappointment...and what's with the lame "Casablanca" refs?
Man, this one just didn't do it for me. Bear in mind, I *like* Reynolds - I devoured "Revelation Space," "Redemption Ark," even the turgid and unsatisfying "Absolution Gap," and was looking forward to seeing what he could do with a slipstream/counterfactual plot.

What have we here? Thin characterization, endless, tension-free chase sequences, and (surprisingly) lotsa pseudoscience. What I liked about Reynold's earlier work was the way he let nanotechnology, exotic-physics propulsion systems, and alien contact produce recognizably human cultural responses - but in "Century Rain" he's given us a mysterious, ancient "hyperweb" of wormholes interconnecting star systems throughout the galaxy, and it's the least interesting thing in the book! It barely figures in the plot except as an excuse to get us to and from the alternate history of "E2."

I dunno, man. Baxter's Manifold books did this better. Hell, even Carl Sagan did it better - and with less mumbo-jumbo around the physics of it.

Worse, Reynolds here commits the fatal error of cuteness. The wildly technophile Slasher culture derives its name and outlook from "a certain Web community of the late twentieth century" (ack), and there are at least three gratuitous in-jokes turning on famous lines from "Casablanca" - "stick my neck out," "beautiful friendship," and "Paris." (Don't get me wrong: I adore "Casablanca," but this ain't the place to celebrate it.)

In summary: this almost feels like a piece of juvenilia acquired and published after the success of the "Revelation Space" books. I'm not ready to write Reynolds off just yet, but I'm afraid "Century Rain" has knocked him off my auto-buy list.

Worth reading, but interestingly flawed
Not revelation space. This starts with a genuine puzzle: humanity on earth has been wiped out hundreds of years ago. But contemporaneously a strange murder case needs solving in Paris, France. It's not time-travel or a parallel universe, so how can this be? Rather deus ex machina is the answer, but this is just background to the plot!

The Paris detective stuff is really not bad: believable characterisation, trademark snappy dialogue and organic plot development. Genuinely page-turning stuff.

At the half-way point it's all change, however. We get into an extended hi-tech chase sequence and the plot development stalls. The editor should have been harsher here. More serious is the collapse of plot credibility. Why would the "extremist slashers" want to unleash their genocidal plan on E2? Both revenge and the quest for real-estate are equally implausible as motivations. And the ending is scrappy.

A shame really - this had potential for audience crossover, but SF folk will like it, even those who hang out at /.

first novel reworked?
All the earmarks of an early novel -- not remotely in the class of Revelation Space series in terms of plot sophistication, crafting of cultures, motivation of characters and such.

In fact "Century Rain", when stood next to Reynolds supposedly earlier books, is so much less an effort, that it smells of a cheap publisher scam -- find some unpublished early work by newly acclaimed writer, spruce it up a bit and publish it as a later work.

Almost half the novel is smothered in a tedious and embarrassingly ill constructed "out of the frying pan" sequence where the two protagonists escape from one increasingly improbable death defying situation only to land in an even worse mess

Scant attention is paid to the pace, detail, nuance and character motivation that made Reynolds wonderous Revelation Space series the gold standard of hard SF.

On the whole, I want my money back!!