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The Quiet War (Gollancz)
 
 

The Quiet War (Gollancz) [Kindle Edition]

Paul McAuley
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)

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Review

"the fascinating inventiveness of the bio-engineered life-forms, the intricate detail of both the societies and habitats, the complex characters all amounted to a fabulous story. This is a book that has been carefully thought out and the author displays a wealth of knowledge on subjects such as bio-remediation and terraforming. It's a tale well worth taking the time to get into and enjoying McCauley's vision of the future." (SF CROWSNEST )

"An impressively realised tale of competing ideologies that tackles pertinent questions. This is big, clever science fiction." (BBC FOCUS )

"The author creates a magnificent sense of gravitas and wonder as he describes conflict. The ideas expounded are genuinely fascinating and well thought out. The stage is set for war and it is beautifully handled." (SCI FI NOW )

"Few writers conjure futures as convincingly as McAuley: his latest novel deftly combines bold characterisation, a thorough understanding of political complexity, and excellent science." (Eric Brown THE GUARDIAN )

"The Quiet War is a cleverly plotted book, laced with compelling science, and McAuley's scientific background shines through." (BOOKGEEK.CO.UK )

"It's a complex, multilayered novel, almost an SF version of 'Bleak House' or 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. It's packed with great characters, breathtaking set pieces and intriguing SF ideas." (Dave Golder SFX )

"Paul McAuley's new space epic finds him deep in Ken MacLeod territory. McAuley depicts his future plausibly." (PRESS ASSOCIATON )

"With restrained brilliance, McAuley takes that hardy SF perennial, the interplanetary war, and shows us how one might actually develop. This novel shows off many of McAuley's strengths - his solid plotting, his command of scientific theory, his sense of the complex moral and political implications of each advance." (Matt Bielby DEATHRAY )

"Combines the damn-the-torpedoes, full speed ahead narrative impetus of a Peter F Hamilton, with the detailed, even meticulous attention to world-building and character development that distinguished Kim Stanley Robinson's classic Mars sequence. McAuley has always been a stylish writer, but he outdoes himself here. The Quiet War marks Paul McAuley's triumphant return to full-bore space opera." (Paul Witcover LOCUS )

Book Description

This exotic, fast-paced space opera turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?

Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 731 KB
  • Print Length: 448 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz (26 Aug 2010)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B0043M67B2
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • X-Ray: Not Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #7,917 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, entertaining and serious SF 18 May 2009
Format:Paperback
McAuley returns to the harder end of the SF range with this expansive and complex novel. The story unfolds on a big scale - it offers heady thrills and exciting set pieces - but as ever with McAuley the real success of the book is down to the powerful and precise characterizations. Stories live or die with how much you care about characters, and the people here, for all their posthuman wonders, are utterly believable and true. Few writers succeed at the macro and micro as well as McAuley. His best novel since White Devils and his best pure SF book since Fairyland.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
There is not much to say about this novel, not because it is bad but because it is extremely good. In fact there is nothing to find fault with. The setting is the solar system, after Earth has been devastated by global warming, and is beginning to rebuild, while thriving colonies have been established on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

All sounds idyllic but it is not. Earlier, colonists from the Moon fled to Jupiter and Saturn after the colony on Mars was nuked by China. Earth is now controlled by three power blocs, Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. All are run by powerful families who squabble behind the scenes. The poor live in overcrowded cities, denied access to the regenerating countryside. Science is fostered, but mainly to create weapons, sometimes involving brutal biological and psychological re-structuring of people.

In stark contrast, the descendants of the Moon colonists, known as the Outers, live in free communities, run by continuous e-ballots. They delve into the physical and biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, to improve their technologies and bodies and to spread new forms of life by creating new ecosystems on previously sterile moons. The 'Quiet War', a low-intensity conflict with little all out fighting, deliberately engineered by factions in Greater Brazil, breaks out after a reconciliation mission to build an Earth-like habitat on Callisto is sabotaged.

On one hand the novel succeeds as a classic space opera, with a militaristic regime trying to control freedom-loving individualists. There is plenty of action, from a ground assault on a domed city to balletic space battles, using clever weapons and some effective 'dumb' ones, like asteroids used as missiles. Heinlein would be proud.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Not quiet enough, not thoughtful enough... 14 Feb 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Sorry, but I had a few problems with this one.

The characters were gossamer thin. The politics, as depicted, was infantile and simplistic. The communities shown, where they were shown at all, were smug bourgeois facsimiles with few concessions to the complex reality of human beings. And in spite of all the hints (for they are only hints, not true scientific explorations) these characters are human, albeit faux humans. In the real world, having a pacemaker fitted or recieving hormone or genetic treatment does not make one 'evolved'. Nor does plastic surgery.

The space technology is sketched out sparingly, relying on knowledge of SF tropes and info-dumps that expand at length without really illuminating. The action scenes and supposed ruthlessness of the nasties comes across as written with the bored air of a pacifist who doesn't really want to delve into the full complexities of war. And the secret agent, in spite of his supposed conditioning, was about as much use as a chocolate ashtray. The baddies should simply have sent an untrained conscript and saved themselves a lot of time and money - the level of professionalism would have been about the same. If this is the best Paul can do with military style action scenes then it would have been better not to have bothered. They were neither exciting nor necessary.

The only redeeming features of this novel are its depiction of the bodies in our solar system, like Callisto, and the vacuum organisms, which are truly unique and, on a place like Callisto, surely very relevant. I honestly feel it would have been better if Paul had just ditched the right-on utopianism and concentrated the entire novel on the vacuum organisms, because I got the sense that this was the only subject the author truly loved and cared about.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Behind Science Fiction's Iron Curtain 27 Oct 2010
Format:Paperback
Let me tell you a story.

In the far-flung future, humanity has spread across the stars. Earth has very probably gone the way of the dodo: if it exists at all, it's a smoldering mess of a planet, barren, stricken, utterly bereft of life or the prospect thereof. We past generations have had our wicked, heathen way with the world, leaving our by-all-accounts more evolved descendants no choice but to venture further afield in order to survive. People have colonised distant planets, moons, built interstellar cruisers, fleets of space-liners. They have gone on.

But resources have become dangerously scarce. Despite centuries of peace, humanity has fallen back on fears it had thought long forgotten. Tensions are at an all-time high; factions squabble with one another; politicians bicker pointlessly. And then someone, somewhere, starts a fight. Like a rash of pimples, war breaks out.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, why don't you!

Evidently, Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author Paul McAuley has. The Quiet War - part the first of a duology concluded in this year's Gardens of the Sun - is smart, self-aware sci-fi from an author who's learned his lesson. It's a novel which takes as its refreshing core tenet not another interminable iteration of the same old space battles we've been reading about for decades - dare I say centuries - but the build-up to boiling point. McAuley's business in The Quiet War is the slow burn which leads to the titular conflict rather than the fast thrash of so much science fiction.

In Professor Doctor Sri-Hong Owen and "the traitor" Macy Minnot, McAuley offers up a pair of narrative chaperones - one on either side of the ever-escalating crisis.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book
If you are looking for an in-depth sci fi trilogy that is INCREDIBLY well written then look no further. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Christovski
3.0 out of 5 stars The Green Goddess War??
I wonder if this was a conscious attempt to write a Genesis for Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe? Consider the similarities: genetically modified Outers (albeit in the outer solar... Read more
Published 7 months ago by DB
4.0 out of 5 stars Almost Asimov
Wandering and blustery.Quite like the way that the laws of physics(inertia,speed of light etc.)are ignored (like Asimov). Read more
Published 11 months ago by mike millbank
5.0 out of 5 stars Great summer read - truly unleashes your imagination
The book is fantastic, the narrative is great and the stories are very thrilling. It follows a number of characters and the sheer amount of science makes everything believable to... Read more
Published 12 months ago by AL
2.0 out of 5 stars Difficult read, with an awkward narrative style developing after a...
Initially I was very engaged by the plot and characters, with a nice flowing story line. But after about a third of the book it seemed to revert to a he said she said, he did she... Read more
Published 13 months ago by J. Carter
3.0 out of 5 stars Hard SF but lacking in soul
As hard-core SF the science in this is extremely imaginative and thoroughly covered - to the extent that some paragraphs could be cut from a bio/nano engineering manual from the... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Matt Nicholson
4.0 out of 5 stars Great Hard SciFi
Having grown up reading loads of SciFi as a teen, especially stories from the 1960s and 1970s - Dick, Asimov et al - I always enjoyed the way those writers managed to depict future... Read more
Published on 6 Oct 2010 by Remus
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Impressed
I was very impressed. This is in the top bracket of modern UK Space Opera, and the sequel, Gardens of the Sun, really works. Good characters, excellent plot, and packed with ideas. Read more
Published on 31 Aug 2010 by Scrondule
1.0 out of 5 stars Unreadable
I was really looking forwards to this book. However, I should have taken more notice of the wider reviewer comments (at amazon.com) regarding poor writing and punctuation. Read more
Published on 16 Aug 2010 by Robbie Smiler
4.0 out of 5 stars Probably just to quiet
Having thought about it for a moment what I think is wrong with this book is that is has to many stories. Read more
Published on 12 Jun 2010 by Haydies
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