3.5
Ancestral Night
ByPublisher Description
“Outstanding…Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.
Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence—with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big—just once—to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.
Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton—“Bear's ability to create breathtaking variations on ancient themes and make them new and brilliant is, perhaps, unparalleled in the genre” (Library Journal, starred review).
A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.
Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence—with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big—just once—to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.
Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton—“Bear's ability to create breathtaking variations on ancient themes and make them new and brilliant is, perhaps, unparalleled in the genre” (Library Journal, starred review).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities36 Reviews
3.5
Ella Brenan
Created about 2 months agoShare
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CJSJR
Created 3 months agoShare
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Mdawg
Created 6 months agoShare
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Regina Petty
Created 10 months agoShare
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“Bumping down 1 star after re-read. There were some great themes—transhumanism and obligation to society, just to name a couple. And it really made me think. But the treatment of those themes was unnecessarily deep in some places and disappointingly shallow in others.
The political situation was just plain weird. Imagine a very few extreme conservatives and extreme liberals collaborating in violent ways to stick it to a moderate majority. Likewise, I had a hard time understanding the economics in those societies. Again, it felt like a weird mashup of extremes: a Star Trek-like utopia and entrepreneur-heavy communism+capitalism.
I loved the variety of sentient species. I wish I could have seen more interaction between them.
I loved the spaceships and technology. The method of faster-than-light travel (new to me) was interesting.
Lots of repetitive text for unimportant things, like the protagonist’s aching aft hands. It’s like the author wanted to include these things in the novel but couldn’t decide where, so sprinkled them in lots of different places, then forgot to edit out the copies. It was very distracting.
The story was overly complex in a lot of areas (like a Rube Goldberg machine), and that could have generated a lot of humor. But mostly it was just confusing. I still don’t understand the author’s mental gymnastics to arrange the meet-up between the antagonist and protagonist.”
mactammonty harris
Created 11 months agoShare
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“As always, the writing and world building are beautiful. The main character's stream of consciousness is annoying. The weird changes in language started to be annoying. Then, 75% of the characters were killed off, leaving the annoying one.
I was no longer invested in finding out what would happen next. DNF'D at 40%.”
About Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has since published fifteen novels and numerous short stories. She writes in both the science fiction and fantasy genres and has won critical acclaim in both. She has won the Hugo Award more than once. She lives in Massachusetts. Visit her on X @Matociquala.
Other books by Elizabeth Bear
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