CompleteMartialArts.com - Permanence
|
List Price: $27.95
Our Price: $31.31
Availability: N/A
|
Average Customer Rating:   
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 480
Publication Date: 2002-05-17
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
|
Young Rue Cassels of the Cycler Compact -- a civilization based around remote brown dwarf stars -- is running for her life from her bullying brother, Jentry, who has stolen her family inheritance and threatens to sell her into slavery. Fleeing in a shuttle spacecraft from the sparsely populated and austere comet-mining habitat she has lived in her whole life, she spots a distant, approaching object, and stakes a legal claim to it. It is not the valuable comet she hoped for but something even more wonderful, an abandoned Cycler starship.
Since the discovery of a faster-than-light drive, unfortunately operable only between larger stars, the Cycler Compact civilization has gradually dwindled. It's much cheaper for the star-based civilizations of the new Rights Economy to bypass the stops that can't be made with the new technology, and the civilizations of the brown stars are gradually sinking into anarchy and chaos. It has been decades since the last Cycler ship passed anywhere near the system in which Rue grew up. Her discovery unleashes a fury of action, greed, and interstellar intrigue as many factions attempt to take advantage of the last great opportunity to revitalize-and perhaps control--the Compact.
This is the story of Rue's quest to visit and claim this ship and its treasures, set against a background of warring empires, strange alien artifacts, and fantastic science. It is a story of hope and danger, of a strange and compelling religion, Permanence, unique to this star-faring age, and of the rebirth of life and belief in a place at the edge of forever.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Horrid
Comment: I kept at it, long after it was obvious the quality of the story and execution just weren't going to improve. I found some small measure of solace by refusing to read the last five pages. Its the closest I could come to spitting in schroeder's eye. I think i might buy a hamster so i can line it's cage with this train wreck . im a bit peeved.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What the hell happened?
Comment: Spoiler ahoy!
After the majesty and brilliant imagination of Ventus, the author's previous novel, I had high expectations for Permanence. Schroeder showed such a competence for world-creation and characterisation in Ventus, I felt like I wanted to live in his book, and was sorry to have to read the last page. It was like an enormous, delicious feast that left me wanting more. So it was to my immense disappointment to find that in contrast, reading Permanence is like eating a bowl of mud. To wit: Thin, underdeveloped characters (excuse me, but how old is Rue Cassels? She acts like a teenager, but is apparently much older. All I could see through the entire book was a shrill, emotionally overwrought child wandering around like she owned the place and somehow being wooed by a 45 year-old sexually repressed subservient monk), a plot that packs a million things in, but still manages to feel meandering, pointless and dull (I honestly thought part one was an experiment in plot drift), a central conceit that seems clever and imaginative at first but quickly becomes frustrating and repetitive (I never want to read the word "cycler" ever again), and an irritating propaganda-like push for something called NeoShintoism (note the pretentious CamelCase), whose practitioners are the most smug, self-satisfied douche bags this side of a Tibetan monastery. And to top it all off, just as the most interesting aspect of the book starts to get going (the discovery and utilisation of the Jentry's Envy), suddenly we're trapped on the most boring, insipid, poorly developed planet I have ever experienced in a sci-fi novel for a quarter of its length! Why?? What made Schroeder think it would be a good idea to abandon such a fascinating concept as an alien spacecraft designed specifically for other aliens to use and have his idiotic characters wander around aimlessly for two-hundred pages working through their bland childhood angst? Is his editor a naked mole rat? How could you not see that this makes for bad storytelling? It boggles the mind. And don't get me started on the ending. This book should have been titled "Deus Ex Machina, and How Not To Utilise It". People who say Absolution Gap's ending is bad (which it isn't if you read the rest of the stories set in the RS universe, but that's neither here nor there) should read this book and have their eyes opened to how truly bad endings can be.
You may be wondering, if I hated it so much, why I gave this book two stars instead of one. Well, there's genuinely interesting stuff in here. The exploration of the Jentry's Envy is fantastically imaginative and gripping, and the expectation that they would return to it is basically what kept me reading. The first chapter is tense and exciting and shows a promise never quite fulfilled, and the sense of cold, remote, empty space is palpable and something that I genuinely enjoy. But I can get that in pretty much any Alastair Reynolds or Greg Egan novel, and without all the lameness that comes with it in this case.
If you like deep space hard sci-fi, you will more than likely enjoy the first half of this book (although a word of warning, there is FTL travel), and especially if you enjoy the BDO style. But as soon as the Jentry's Envy is under human control, close the book, put it down, and walk away; there is nothing more for you here.
Seriously, how do you go from Ventus, to this? I am baffled. Baffled I tell you!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Free SF Reader
Comment: A fairly straightforward space adventure. A girl from a small backwater joint escapes from her brother who basically wants to sell her into servitude.
While on the lam she stumbles across a rare alien spaceship, and meets up with a relative on another planet.
A mission to get to the ship and claim it turns into struggle and conflict between different political groups.
Schroeder satirises the rabid corporate copyright/drm/activation software mentality here by having one group actually live their whole lives like this, with their basic 'inscape' view of reality showing objects by their costs and rightsholding, so a rose would show it was worth 24.23 rather than look like a rose.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good, bad and ugly
Comment: The author is intellectually entertaining with the cultural background of this novel, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, but that was also the novel's downfall.
As others have discussed here, the two human civilizations were separate because FTL ships couldn't be launched from brown dwarf stars, where the cycler humans live. Without revealing the ending, the author built a scaffold that supported the cycler civilization as "better" than the FTL civilization, then ...
No, I can't say anymore, except that, in the end (to solve a plot problem he had painted himself into,) he tried to have it both ways, and I can't image human beings accepting his solution when another exists.
All of the criticism from others about flat characters and "deus ex machina" solutions to problems, I agree with. Actually, the solution to the plot problem that I can't go into without revealing the ending is classic "deus ex machina."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Cardboard characters and unengaging plotting
Comment: I bought this book following a paper enthusing about some of its ideas in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS Jan/Feb 2005). Unfortunately, I have to agree with earlier reviewers who have highlighted a pedestrian writing style, implausible 'characterisation' and character motivation, and the unengaging 'by numbers' plot development.
I abandoned the book at page 78 as unreadable, not something I do often. My advice to the author is to read the books which you just can't put down, and really think about how their authors achieve that effect. Even in plot-driven stories, the characters have to be real and must be able to invoke empathy from the reader.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|