alan laird

It's hard to see this book with such few reviews. Ballantyne's AI trilogy quietly expanded the cannon of AI narrative without it playing second to the characters and narrative. If you haven't read this, you need to.

Space Skimmer is a concise story that could easily be a short story as it establishes the characters so well. It's anchored in lots of golden age tropes and is a nice little adventure. It feels very ‘written for tv' in that characters are very different and much of the story comes from how they interact with each other. It would have been a good pilot.

Even if you never read this book, you should read the first ten pages. chef's kiss

Choices make all the difference and some timelines are dark. Really dark.

I was really impressed with this book as it's so early in the author's career. Some great concepts held at just enough distance to stay in the story instead of fussing with the science. Loved the off camera growth of characters.

Nonlinear storytelling can be really annoying and there were a number of times during this book when I had to turn back to the chapter heading to figure something out. But, by the end of the book, I could see how important it was to my appreciation of the protagonist.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a little too gritty for me sometimes but for a book set in Africa 20+ years in the future, it seems about right.