Poul Anderson (1926–2001)

I tend to be more forgiving of hard SciFi storytelling foibles than other genres and with that in mind, this was...fine? I'm glad I spent the time reading Genesis but I would not generally recommend it.

Which is a shame.

There were some really interesting concepts (the Galaxy Brain, our "heroes" being subsumed by their respective AIs, Gaia, the Earth node of the Galaxy Brain, running simulations of humanity) but the execution was just not there. Even for hard SciFi the story was disjointed and Anderson spent way to many pages building the story and not enough telling the story. In fact, thinking back, the "story" was more a backdrop for the SciFi. It was there, but the editor could have just as easily stripped the story and been left with an essay about the Galaxy Brains and how they communicated (mythically, of course, as Anderson reminded us every other paragraph!).

I think a large part of my disappoint(?) comes from a glimpse we have of Anderson actually telling a story in the middle of the book. For one, maybe two chapters, we have a really interesting and enjoyable glimpse into a society which had, as far as I could tell, no bearing on the story and was never heard from again. I assume it was meant to show us Gaia in action before we really start to learn about her (mythically anthropomorphized, of course) but it read like that chapter was pulled from a different manuscript and inserted into the middle of this book.… (més)