On the Steel Breeze

Poseidon's Children, Book 2

De: Alastair Reynolds

Narrado por: Adjoa Andoh

The award-winning author of Blue Remembered Earth continues his saga as the next generation of the Akinya family crosses interstellar space seeking humanity' s future...

Chiku Akinya, great granddaughter of the legendary space explorer Eunice and heir to the family empire, is just one among millions on a long one way journey towards a planet they hope to call their new home. For Chiku, the journey is a personal one, undertaken to ensure that the Akinya family achieves its destiny among the stars.

The passengers travel in huge self-contained artificial worlds - holoships - putting their faith in a physics they barely understand. Chiku' s ship is called Zanzibar - and over time, she will discover it contains an awesome secret - one which will lead her to question almost every certainty about her voyage, and its ultimate destiny.

©2013 Alastair Reynolds (P)2013 Hachette Audio

Such a slow storyline + bad narration = fail

The storyline vaguely continues, and like everything else by Reynolds has a 15-hour build up until you hit something interesting that makes you decide to finish the book.
The narrator...wow. The first book had a narrator that was so exceptionally difficult to understand that I created a "black list" of narrators just to prevent ever accidentally getting something by him again. I was especially looking forward to this and the 3rd book being by a different narrator....obviously a result of reader complaints I assumed.
Boy was I mistaken. This narrator was even more difficult to understand. The main character sounds like yodeling Yoda with a cold trying to mimic Scooby Doo. It drove me nuts. And the accents trying to give african characters some realism just alienated readers because we cant understand it. I dont know how many hundreds of words & sentences that were lost to me, and going back 30 seconds never helps because they are completely and entirely incomprehensible.

Impatient For The Third Book

Humor, joy and wonder, this is high end sci fi. Alastair Reynolds read by Adjoa Andoh is just about perfect.

Another solid book from Alastair Reynolds

The book itself is pretty good, but it's honestly rather hard to tell with the incredibly annoying accents the narrator does

A very complex narrative

The storyline is not disappointing but I did have some trouble with the narrator's heavy accent at times. attribute this to my superannuated ears.

Weak middle of the trilogy

On the Steel Breeze is the 2nd installment of Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Children trilogy. While the focus is still with the Akinya clan, this is the next generation with Chiku Akinya, Sunday's child splitting herself into multiple entities and sharing memories. This trick allows Reynolds to craft two simultaneous stories, one in our solar system and the 2nd on a "holoship" heading towards a distant star system. Improvements on rejuvenation technology permit this story to be technologically advanced relative to Blue Remembered Earth.

Basically, an alien artifact around a distant star has spawned a caravan of holoships, hollowed out asteroids transporting millions of humans to what is expected to be a newly formed world. Mysteries surrounding the alien artifact around Crucible drive the plot with both Chikus doing all the digging while avoiding the nefarious interference of an artificial machine intelligence with vague, ill-defined motives.

Sadly, while the writing is engaging with excellent pacing and solid character development, there are serious deficits that render much of the action inscrutable at times. For example, the holoships take off for Crucible and use their supply of slow down fuel to achieve more speed and arrive quicker, but without a way to insert into orbit on arrival. The politics on the holoship and the caravan as a whole are inadequately detailed and so the prohibition on research to figure out a way to slow down simply doesn't make sense. As with the 1st installment, the fascination with aquatic biological engineering doesn't fit with an outer space themed environment. Also, Reynolds liked the character of Eunice so much that he created a machine intelligent clone of her, hidden away on the holoship overseeing intelligent elephants which made little sense other than adding some dramatic action scenes and a setup for volume 3. Finally, the denouement with a pseudo-computer virus resetting Earth, seemed a bit like the TV Batman series with a unique, one time utility belt day-saving gadget.

The narration is well done with an excellent range of voices, with appropriate tone and mood. The musical interludes that separate the different Chikus was also much appreciated. Finally, one observation, not a criticism, just an observation: the story has the sense that Reynolds took a bet, a dare, or even a voluntary challenge to write a story where every major character (even including the elephants and machines) is female.

I hate accents

Would you consider the audio edition of On the Steel Breeze to be better than the print version?

Have no idea

What did you like best about this story?

The Story - it's good.

Would you be willing to try another one of Adjoa Andoh’s performances?

I don't know.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Yes. I really have a problem with the accents. I have a hard time thinking a 200 Y.O. computerized person in the future would speak in pidgin english with a think chinese accent. I would prefer the narrator just read the story rather than do voices. It is too over the top and distracting for me.

Any additional comments?

I assume the voices were a director or author choice. The narrator was good.

Wonderful Performance

the performance and musical interlude were amazing. well choreographed. well timed. this orator should be sought out and the company behind her should receive a prize.

This narrator deserves an Emmy

...or the audiobook version thereof. Do they award Grammys for audiobooks? If not, it needs to be so.

This performance is so evocative, so immersive, I want to live in the book’s universe instead of my own. It is not an easy universe to live in by any stretch, but I want to be along for the mission of Zanzibar.

Thank you for the virtual ride!

Much Better than Blue Remembered Earth

I've listened to almost all of Reynold's works, and Blue Remembered Earth was one of my least favorite. Just didn't have the mystery, subtle suspense, complex character development, and awe-inspiring world building that marks his other stories. On The Steele Breeze, though, felt more like classic Reynolds. The story really captivated me from beginning to end. The narrator did a great job as well.

You unfortunately probably want the print version

I think I'm pretty open minded, but sadly the audio performance on this story leaves a lot to be desired. It's a wonky combination of a story-bookish tone and missed nuances. The individual sentences are acted, instead of the scene or character as a whole.

I realized a few hours into this book that the narration was making me think less of Alistair Reynolds' storytelling ability. But when I imagined the scenes as acted by someone like John Lee, I realized the story could have felt so much more rich.

Instead of suspense, I felt apathy. Instead of urgency, I felt impatient. Instead of voice acting bringing personalities to life, I was repeatedly taken aback at how overly strong the accents were, including her use of unwritten, amazingly repetitive slurping inhales for the aquatics. The majority of dialog between characters intended for development instead feels flimsy because of the storybookishness tone. Everybody that isn't Russian or Southern-redneck uses the same African intonation, including the Japanese-named character (which got no special accent and is apparently African.)

I felt that the African style worked better in the first book. Despite my best efforts to enjoy the audiobook, I was constantly distracted by the audio medium. I frankly intend to repeat my experience of this story in print, in hopes that I can think more highly of the original text.