Splintered Suns (Humanity's Fire)

Great Space Opera with entertaining characters. Multiple story lines that weave together in a constantly evolving plot. Grand scale brought to us on a Tier 23 Hyperspace platter by Michael Cobley, love child of Ian M Banks, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds. Great fun!

Yes, the beginning can be slow but once the main adventure starts I had a hard time putting it down. Really enjoyed the story and the mix of ideas in this book. First time reading this author and I am really glad I picked up this book.

Great author, terrible book. All the other books in humanitys fire were amazing, but this one is awful. 2/10 bc i love his other works, but i didnt make it 1/4 of the way into this before puttin it down

This was just not my cup of tea. I tried to read it, but it was just too fractured. Others may see something I missed.

Dreadful, I'm afraid. I wrote a very long review on Goodreads describing the manifold ways in which this novel fails to satisfy, but I'm afraid Amazon won't let me link to it and it won't fit here.Suffice to say: apparently unedited, apparently unproofread; cardboard characters devoid of motivation; plot driven entirely by offscreen characters dropping new technobabble into the plot as needed (technobabble which is so carefully thought out that it is not kept consistent from one paragraph to the next); seriously padded; enough dropped Chekhov's guns and dangling plot threads to equip a silken armoury; horrendous solecisms, malapropisms, abominably clunky writing and just plain unbelievable "nobody speaks like that" moments unbearably common (multiple per page, sometimes multiple per paragraph). So many flaws that I believe that a full rewrite would be required to render the book readable.I bought it principally on the basis of a rave review in December by the usually trustworthy author Eric Brown in the Guardian, but this is a log-roll: Eric gets specific acknowledgement at the back of the book. This review makes me trust Eric quite a lot less: if he could sit through this and not notice its flaws...Do not trust the Iain Banks quote on the front cover. Banks wrote about four million times better than this, and obviously the quote isn't about this book anyway because Banks is too dead. Almost all published books are better than this. Most fanfic is better than this.

Not as good as his previous tomes in this universe as it wanders around in the middle, indeed some of it could just be cut, and not enough is made of the ending but it starts well! After the first robbery the story splits into two, the “real” Pyke and a digital one coming back to interact, but not integrate, in the last few chapters and both parts are readable and fairly interesting. However the expository bits are repeated, full of meaningless “science” and the part travelling through the exotic flora and fauna need not be there giving the impression of several ideas being mashed together but not coherently- like lumpy soup! If the parts had been trimmed there would have been more space to play around with the multidimensional and problem solving endgames in both parts of the story.

Full marks to Michael Cobley for imagery and descriptive writing - this has been a roller-coaster of a novel with genuinely new (well new to me, anyway) ideas about character development and storyline. It's not exactly my preferred style of story - belief has not so much to be suspended as thrown out the window on occasion - but it's extremely well told. Well worth a read.

Imaginative and readable, perhaps mc couldn’t quite decode how Pykr should speak or behave, the semi pirate Schlick is poor, probably the only poor thing in the novel , the rest is very very good., perhaps he could have stretched the finale some