Imagine reading a fantasy novel. Now imagine that you are a person who has been living under a rock, and has no concept whatsoever of magic, dwarves, wizards, elves, or medieval times and settings. Everything would be fresh and new to you, making the novel very complicated to get through. That's a fair assessment of "Great Sky River" applied to a sci-fi world; everything is new, difficult, and challenging to the reader. My tastes are very diverse, and maybe it's been too long since I read a book from the "complicated" sci-fi genre, but I didn't enjoy this book as much as most people who have reviewed it here.

In the far future, a planet colonized by human beings has come under a siege. The machines have taken over, leaving a few bands of humans to run for their lives or face annihilation. The remaining men and women have banded together into clans, and fight back as best they can against impossible odds. These characters oppose the machines, but there's a problem: each person is also fitted with their own performance-enhancing machines embedded into their flesh, and implanted into their minds.

Once I got through the early confusion, "Great Sky River" seemed like it was going to captivate me. There are plenty of ideas from the imagination of Benford to go around. However... it just doesn't click with me. Example: each human is fitted with Aspects, which are microchips containing the memories and thoughts of long dead human beings, and their thoughts are transmitted to their carriers. The Aspects seem to be able to communicate with the enemy, and also come across as more human than their carriers. All good things. Benford, however, drops the ball, and doesn't develop the idea that these Aspects are more human than the living. The reader is left to infer this.

Sometimes, an inference is more satisfying than an over-descriptive dive into ideas like these; not so here. The problem is the author has spent hundreds of pages describing, expanding, and describing again (from a faux-historical perspective) the gadgets and gizmos to such an extent that it envelops the entire novel. The story gets buried beneath a barrage of technical mumbo-jumbo. As a result, the plot ideas are never brought to light. Most authors with complicated subject matter will create the setting early, and let the story flow once the essentials have been grasped by the audience. Benford seems to think that keeping this book difficult to the extreme is his top priority, but he lost me halfway though. I finished this book while waiting for a revelation that never came. I understood the ending, but by then I didn't care.

It is possible that my tastes have turned away from "hard" sci-fi over the years. I almost considered not reviewing this novel for that reason. Then I remembered the joy of reading "Dune" (Frank Herbert) and the "Hyperion" novels (Dan Simmons), which are equal to "Great Sky River" in complexity, but have an important difference: a compelling, human story featuring characters that live and breathe. Benford can be a fine author, as evidenced by "Heart of the Comet" and "Timescape". Try those books instead, and skip this one. I give "Great Sky River" 2 stars, rounding down to 2.


Humans In Decline   September 10, 2005
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

This is the third in Benford's "Galactic Center" series, and the first of the novels to actually merit the name. The other books are "In the Ocean of Night" (1977) and "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), set in the near future not far from Earth, and "Tides of Light" (1989), "Furious Gulf" (1994), and "Sailing Bright Eternity" (1995) set, as is this one, about 30,000 years later.

This is a time when humans have settled the central regions of the galaxy and have entered a period of decline forced on them by mechanical intelligences, robots who long preceded them. The middle two novels tell the story from the point of view of the
man Killeen Bishop, starting on the planet "Snowglade" where humans (heavily genetically adapted and plugged in to electronic devices) live as scavengers among mechanical constructions, a world near the galactic black hole's accretion disk. Benford's treatment of the human augmentations as something they take for granted and use with considerable skill is an interesting adaptation of "cyberpunk" ideas, though he does expend many words in the novel discussing the technical details.

Most of the machines ignore the humans or treat them as simple nuisances, but the terrifying, powerful and seemingly indestructible "Mantis" pursues and haunts the Bishop family from this novel to the end of the series, ostensibly trying to understand humans better, and in particular why they are so horrified by its sense of "art".

Another entity appears in this third novel and remains through the end - a "magnetic" life-form of vast extent, with roots in the black hole accretion disk and strands reaching to nearby stars. Benford's physics blends with poetry in describing this and many other wonders he imagines for the cosmos.

The character development here is reasonably well-done, though not as convincing as in the later "Furious Gulf". Killeen starts out as a sharp but unreliable member of the clan, growing and maturing as tragedy surrounds him. Benford seems to have a relatively limited range of primary characters: once again Killeen is the rebel, suspicious of authority and the good intentions of others, yet he ends up leading a band toward new horizons at the end.

It would have been more satisfying to have other books spanning the vast gap between the end of the second novel and the beginning of this one - rather that time period appears in flashbacks from the electronic "aspects" the humans carry, always showing nostalgia for times past. This leaves the novels rather open-ended (many threads not nicely cloesd) - but life is like that too. The breadth of Benford's scientifically plausible imagination in these novels is amazing in itself; read these novels to gain a perspective on life in the universe and what a sufficiently advanced civilization might do with a galaxy such as our own.


Excellent   September 15, 2000
 5 out of 8 found this review helpful

The only reason I can't give this book five stars is that the deus ex machina ending was disappointing. Perhaps the communications from beings that live in stars and the existence of a hidden ship that just happens to be awaiting the arrival of our hero wouldn't have seemed so left-field if I had known that this was the third book of a series when I began it. I presume that these are plot elements left over from the first two books. Isn't there some way to let the reader know that before he begins reading?

At any rate, I plan to go back and read the prior books before forging ahead. It looks like I still have a lot of great reading ahead of me!


Haunting and Mesmerizing   May 13, 2006
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Over the last 20 years or so I've attempted to read all of the great Sci-Fi. The first time I read this book was about 15 years ago and at that time I felt that it was the best Sci-Fi novel that I have ever read. Clarke, Hebert, Asimov, Card, none of them have ever written as original and compelling a story as this one. I recently read it again and it was just as enthralling as the first time. Buy this book!

The jargon is a little challenging, but it adds to the authenticity of the novel. Once you get the feel for it, will seem natural.

The plot is flawless. Man has populated the stars and in doing so, crossed paths with a race that is so advanced, man hardly rates a second look. Unfortunately, this species requires a dry, almost waterless world, so as a result, humans find themselves on the brink of extermination at the... hands?, of a heartless, ruthless species.

Constantly on the run, reduced to a mere vestige of their great past, humanity is again a tribal unit of hunter/gatherers, scraping out an existence beneath the... radar?, forced to utilize the alien technology to their own ends, man searches for hope on the edge of extinction.




wow   March 21, 1998
 2 out of 5 found this review helpful

this is the beginning of the absolutely best science fiction series I have ever read in my entire life. I've been an avid reader of sf for fifty years and this is one of the best sf books I have ever read. I love this guy!