Poseidon's Wake

By: Alastair Reynolds

Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh

Length: 27 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

"Few SF writers merge rousing adventure with advanced futuristic technology as skillfully as Alastair Reynolds" (Toronto Star), the award-winning author of On the Steel Breeze.

In the conclusion of his Poseidon's Children saga, the Akinya family receives an invitation from across the stars - and a last opportunity to redeem their name....

"Send Ndege". The cryptic message originated 70 light-years away from the planet Crucible, where Ndege Akinya lives under permanent house arrest for her role in the catastrophe that killed 417,000 people. Could it be from her mother, Chiku, who vanished during a space expedition decades earlier?

Ndege's daughter, Goma, a biologist, joins the crew of the Travertine dispatched to Gliese 163 to uncover the source behind the enigmatic message. Goma's odyssey will take her not only into the farthest reaches of space but centuries into her family's past, where the answers to the universe's greatest mysteries await....

©2015 Alistair Reynolds (P)2015 Orion Publishing Group

a great conclusion to the series probably not

what a great book all in its own Kama I can't wait for the next one.

Excellent performance

this was a excellent audio performance paired with a reasonably good conclusion to the trilogy but not the equal of the first or second books

Reads like it's lacking plot revisions

There's something admirably simple about this trilogy, especially when you zoom out and look at the romantic bird's eye view, but something about its storytelling method just doesn't sit right with me.

The trilogy was rendered for us as a long string of montages between rather sparse events. Time and attention went into every scene, but it's all just characters standing around, with no ability to act on what little information they have. Subplots spring up everywhere, and turn out to be completely pointless as soon as the story moves on. The only result is that the character personalities are colored just slightly. Even the events that are at the heart of the story come off strangely. A transmission sent across 70 lightyears just for fun apparently, a sabotage plot that exists for essentially no reason, and of course the centerpiece of the whole series, Poseidon itself, completely ignored by the cast, even at the culmination of events.

The only reason the story has any purpose at all is because Eunice's character regularly forces narrative on the reader in the form of random conjecture, covering topics such as the Watchkeepers, Poseidon and its wonders, what the Endbuilders's must have intended for the universe, their solution to a universe-scale issue, what Poseidon must represent for other species. As a reader, it's all so hollow that you start to see through it rather quickly.

This story, most of all, communicated the uniqueness of everyone's relationships with other characters, and there are a couple of magnificent scenes that were likely At the core of Reynolds's vision for the story, and yet somehow all of the characters come up short in my view. They all say the predictable thing. They all complain in the expected manner. They offer each other perfectly reasonable but highly mundane comforts. They seem to act and think in a contextual vacuum, as if every scene was written independently, somehow only vaguely influenced by events that literally just took place.

When the story is somehow most vulnerable and begging for plot advancement, it's given to us in some supremely bizarre anti-"deux ex machina", something that puts a wrench in the whole story just so that the story should go where Reynolds imagined it should. Mpose's role, Kanu's ship damaged around Poseidon, the use of nanomachinery, the sabotage plot, Eunice's ability to send a message across 70 ly of space and yet can't produce a signal strong enough to contact a ship in the same system, Eunice's alarmingly selective loss of memory any time she might actually be useful... all of it exists just to give texture to something that is frankly quite boring. These are all just loose ends that I guess Reynolds thought there was no reason to tie back into the story, and none of the characters seem to notice.

As a fan of Reynolds, I don't begrudge him the time and effort that he put into this trilogy. The idea for the whole thing must have been infectious, consuming his attention. Now that he's finished it, I'll be happy to see him turn to other stories.

Reynolds has a different kind of brain...

than do most of us, I believe. I've never read someone who gets "alien" so...alien-y...yet so utterly believable. This is the 3rd in the series. Strongly recommend reading in order.

It's not the story - it's the narrator

I need to return this. This narrator is horrible. Cannot stand her. She is OK with the main characters, but the rest is like childrens book witches. Horrible. Combine that with a slow story and I am out. Sorry.

First two books are great but...

The first two are great, introducing great ideas but the third feels like filler.

Great Book

Loved the book. Great addition to an already interesting story. As usual, Reynolds's inclusion of real, hard science into his narrative creates a realistic, believable world for his readers (or listeners) to get lost in. Adjoa Andoh's voice lends depth and feeling to the characters inhabiting the story, making them real, feeling individuals that listeners can empathize with. A truly great story.

Amazing hard sci fi

Alastair Reynolds is one of the great sci fi writers of our time. Highly recommend

Another brilliant story from Reynolds

Reynolds has become my all-time favorite sci-fi writer, for good reason. This book continues to follow the Akinya family as they make history. It's a book you can't stop listening to.

Masterpiece ending to the trilogy

Loved listening to this final book following the Akinya lineage across space. Their interactions s with other intelligences, both machine and organic was fascinating! Reynolds captures the fears and hopes of humanity in such a thorough and satisfying way.