Blue Remembered Earth

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite authors whom I stumbled upon quite by happy accident. I've read almost all of his novels, with one the best being [b:Pushing Ice 89186 Pushing Ice Alastair Reynolds http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309197028s/89186.jpg 2622804], and I'm also a big fan of his Revelation Space series and world. I had a very high bar set for this novel, the first of a supposed 10 I believe.At the beginning, we meet young Sunday and Geoffrey Akinya, siblings who live in future Africa. These two come across an antiquated tank buried in the earth with machinery that somehow gives Sunday a seizure. This is some foreshadowing of things to come. The rest of the novel focuses on the travels of Sunday and Geoffrey as they travel literally across the solar system searching for clues that their grandmother Eunice left for them when she died.That this novel is the first of a series is made pretty obvious by the author's inclusion of so much future tech. Geoffrey lives in the Surveilled World while Sunday chooses to live a little more incognito in the Descrutinised Zone (only on a certain part of the moon). The Mechanism is implied to some kind of thinking machine that watches all humans and can predict their behavior. For instance, at some point Geoffrey attempts to punch someone but is stopped by The Mechanism's communication with something in his own head. The Mechanism has drastically reduced crime on Earth, but there is an ominous feeling like that of Philip K Dick's Minority Report, which is why Sunday chooses to live on the moon.Like other Reynolds novels, there are plenty of heavily modified humans, especially the mer-people. They live in a city in the ocean. Also, there are intelligent projections that can live in golems, long lives, and an abandoned area of Mars run by robots. I love it.After finishing the book, it actually seems like nothing really substantial happened, but the journey there was awesomely adventurous. This novel lived up to what I hope it would be!