Poseidon’s Wake by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Poseidon’s Wake is the third volume in the Poseidon’s Children series by Alastair Reynolds. The events of this book are set a few centuries in the future from the second book – On The Steel Breeze. The main protagonists are still part of the Akinya clan. We find Mpozi, Goma and Ndege on Crucible and Kanu in the Solar System.
The book explores the results of the arrival of the Watchkeepers and the aftermath of the Mandala event at the conclusion of “Steel Breeze”.
Let me be honest – I found the book hard going, yet worthy of the four stars I have given it. There are long passages meditating on the meaning of life and the role of belief. Stay well clear if you are looking for action scenes or military science fiction. This is very much in the vein of Existence by David Brin. We have a McGuffin – vast alien artefacts on the planet Poseidon. The plot revolves around separate expeditions from the Solar System and from Crucible to the hitherto unvisited system following the receipt of a mysterious transmission.
Along the way, we find the machine civilisation explored in the first two books, we find super intelligent elephants as well as inscrutable aliens. Reading this reminded me of Rendezvous with Rama – it has the similar mix of hard science fiction as well the plot point of humans trying to figure out the motivations of an unknowable alien. It is a fitting conclusion to the series and a book that has stayed with me more than I expected it to.
SIDENOTE – There is one thing I never figured out about these books. Where are the White people? We have a future where all the conversation happens in Swahili, or Mandarin or Portugese – but no English. We have characters that are of different ethnicities, but no WASPS. Whats up with that?